Enid Shomer

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile
To be published in 2012 by Simon and Schuster both in the U.S. and the U.K. Set in 1850, this novel imagines that Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, both visitors to Egypt in the early days of the European exploration of the Nile, met and struck up a passionate friendship that altered the course of their lives.

Tourist Season
Ten stories about women, aged seventeen to seventy, each at a pivotal moment in her life. Four of these stories won major prizes; two have appeared in New Stories From the South: The Year's Best. Featured in the Reader's Circle and AtRandom e-newsletters on the Reader's Circle website and www.authorphonechats.com

STARS AT NOON: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran
When she died in 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any aviator in the world. Founder-Director of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, candidate for Congress, and corporate executive, she described her life as "a passage from sawdust to stardust."

Imaginary Men
Winner, Iowa Fiction Prize and LSU/Southern Review Award.

"The thing one quickly senses is the will and the voice, someone saying...'Relax, be comfortable, I'm going to take good care of you.' it turns out to be true. These are very fine stories."

Black Drum
In Black Drum, Enid Shomer fuses mind with body, knowledge with physical being, and affirms the capacity of language to forge this transcendent link...Shomer signals us to make the most of life, despite our limitations and in the face of bewildering catastrophe.

This Close to the Earth
Moving through the cycle of birth, growth, and death, the poems of Enid Shomer are informed by physical knowledge, transforming it into rare and often startling insight. This Close to the Earth celebrates the courage to live intensely in the body. Here are loves, lives, and losses, retold with the energy that bare emotion commands. Peopled by almost touchable characters - John James Audubon, for instance sketching his birds in a pre-dawn light, and the unnamed narrator of "Among the Cows," who learns to "breathe with the Holsteins / as a form of meditation" - these poems explore the natural as well as the human landscape in search of the link between knowledge and the physical self. This Close to the Earth plumbs the deepest of human mysteries - the hunger for union with the people and things of this world.

Stalking the Florida Panther
Winner, Word Works Washington prize

"In this fine first book the eternal themes of love, loss, unrequital, and forgiveness come together with the characters to form a remarkably unified whole. To enter here is to meet and be moved by the gambling father, the long-lost lover, a Jewish child's version of Jesus, women at the tomato packing plant, and Old World ancestors, all fully realized. Shomer's talent is fully mature and should gain her rapid recognition."