Jennifer Jussel’s essay collection, Mellitus: Essays on Up/Rooting, is the winner of the 2026 Howling Bird Press Nonfiction prize. In this interview she discusses the collection’s creative inception, her influences, and hope.

Mellitus will be released this October, and will be available for preorder in June.

How did your idea for Mellitus: Essays on Up/Rooting come about? What was your creative process like?

 The idea for Mellitus originated across several years of denial and convalescence in the Latin sense, meaning to grow “together” and “strong” simultaneously. For most of my life, I didn’t write much about diabetes. I don’t want it to be the most interesting thing about me. But when I read work from other disabled writers like Sonya Huber and Alice Wong, I realized nothing I wrote would be complete until I acknowledged my diabetic body as a gateway to a world of not only personal comprehension but artistic inquiry, literary activism, and human connection.

I began free writing about diabetes in a nonfiction workshop led by Dr. Jill Patterson. She and my classmates saw the contours haunting this book—therapist, mother (who else?), unspoken love—before I did. Once I realized this was a book about how diabetes has paradoxically created both distance and depth in my relationships with my family, other diabetics, and even myself, the rest fell into place.

How long have you been at work on Mellitus?

I made my first attempts at Mellitus in the summer of 2023, before I realized it was going to be a book. Between forest hikes and karaoke jams on a writing retreat with friends, I workshopped a very rough draft whose only surviving line is the first in the book today.

I went back to school in part because I realized how much I needed to learn to tell this story. I studied disability theory, especially Alison Kafer’s concept of “crip futurity,” which asks us to prize the vulnerability that makes us human. Mellitus became my assertion that life’s sweetness is an essential byproduct of our decay. From January through May, I wrote the entirety of the first draft, which I revised throughout the summer.

That was an intense period of productivity. But I’ve never been the disciplined, “write for an hour every morning” kind of writer. And I think this story has been weaving its way through my nerves a long time. It was months of pure generation after years of repression and rumination.

Did you face any particular challenges during your creative process?

Plenty! My research required more emotional fortitude than anticipated. The process was so challenging that research shifted from mere support for the book’s narrative to an integral part of its arc. On the page, I grapple with reading clinical reports about deadly processes taking place inside my own body.

Attempting to trace Dr. S and Nick also forced me to confront the fallibility of traumatic memory. Dr. S was absent from active medical practice websites, social media, and even the Wayback Machine. When I finally found her on provider review sites, I gained another layer of empathy for her. While I was struggling to decipher her, she was surviving her own struggles.

With Nick, I ultimately realized it was truer to my experience to let him remain disappeared. My story is not Nick’s; I never want to presume to speak for him. Instead, it’s enough to know he was real to me, I cared for him, and I am grieving him still amidst his resounding absence. I wish everyone who knew and loved him very well. 

Which authors have significantly influenced you as a person and/or specifically your writing?

Too many to count, but to thank and recommend a few: Ross Gay, whose writing about pain as an experience intertwined with joy feels truer to my life than any of the purely “uplifting” or “depressing” narratives often associated with disability. Sonya Huber, in addition to being a kind and generous writer, helped me recognize the art and activism inherent in writing about chronic illness and disability. I’m also indebted to disability scholars like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Ellen Samuels, and Alison Kafer, who showed me how to embrace disability not only as an identity but a more empathetic, adaptive, and creative mode of being. Alison Bechdel is also a master class in obsession and radical empathy for one’s parents on the page.

Lightning round: Kiese Laymon, Chanel Miller, Michelle Zauner, and yes, Joan Didion, who remains one of the mothers of creative nonfiction as we know it.

In a few of your essays you address hope in regard to diabetes research. How has your understanding of hope developed over your life?

Hope to me is intertwined with trust. Unfortunately, many diabetics lose trust after years inside the healthcare system. Everyone I know who’s been diagnosed longer than ten years has a “just around the corner” story: Their pediatric endocrinologist assured them on the day of their diagnosis that the cure was no more than five years away. I maintain great trust in the power of science. Having started with manual syringe injections and eight finger pricks per day, I’ve experienced amazing improvements in my quality of life through new technologies like glucose sensors and insulin pumps. Recent advancements give me hope there will be a functional cure for type 1 within my lifetime. But I do not yet trust such a cure will be made available or affordable to me while I am young and free of diabetic complications.

There are a few diabetic activists (check out @thechronicallyillest on Instagram) bringing attention to the problems with forced optimism inside a system that privileges mostly white, affluent diabetics. Assuring recently diagnosed diabetics and their grieving parents that this disease isn’t so bad, that their only concern is holding on to hope, is a dangerous perpetuation of the systemic issues plaguing our community. It allows others to deny us the aid—like school-mandated 504 plans—that comes with the disability label in the United States. Hope for the future remains vital, but more important is affordable insulin, equal access to quality healthcare, and uplifting the voices of diabetics trying to advance real change right now, when many of our lives and rights are currently at risk.

What advice would you give to family members, partners, and spouses of someone with type 1 diabetes? How can loved ones be supportive in ways they might not recognize?

I’m immensely lucky to be surrounded by a community that uplifts every aspect of me. You can love and support a diabetic the way you love and support anyone: listening attentively, asking how to help, and growing alongside them. I’m definitely grateful to my husband for cooking me balanced dinners and bringing me juice boxes during middle-of-the-night low blood sugars. But I’m more grateful that his unwavering care encourages me every day to become a more balanced, kind, and joyful person. Similarly, my family has taught me that constancy and advocacy are a means of love. And the friends I consider family have helped me to celebrate my “extra” needs as a natural part of me, worthy of being met. Not all of us get a catchy diagnosis to label our needs, but to love wholeheartedly is to accept that everyone needs extra, in one way or another.

Do you plan to write more about chronic illness and/or disabilities in the future?

Yes! I am currently at work on my second book, a full-length collection of essays that, while still personal, explores the systemic aspects of diabetes. The longer I study this illness, the more I see it as an American microcosm. The diabetic experience encapsulates the capitalist obsession with productivity, the corporatization of the American healthcare industry, and the desire to shrink people with disabilities into something palatable, even to the point of disappearance.

The book includes more research, interviews, and archival work as I trace the little-known history of type 1 before the invention of injectable insulin. That’s been a trip because I keep recognizing glimmers of myself and other diabetics I know—hard-working, ambitious, struggling, resisting—in the stories of people over a century past. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you want to know more or to support this project!

What message(s) do you hope Mellitus imparts on a disabled or chronically ill reader? What should a person who doesn’t live with those challenges take away?

What I love about creative nonfiction is it exposes the churn of human thinking: always raising a million questions without easy answers. As readers, we come away with our own interpretations of a book’s “meaning,” but I hope we’ll never give up our questioning. I hope readers of Mellitus will remain curious about the questions this book raises. What do we lose when we try to push past bodily or literal grief? How might embracing our vulnerabilities, disabled or not, open new possibilities of love and community to us? In a world that increasingly prizes brute strength, homogeneity, and productivity, these are the questions over which I find myself churning.

Jennifer Jussel is a type 1 diabetic writer and essayist originally from Austin, Texas. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and is pursuing a Ph.D. in English and creative writing from Texas Tech University, where she also teaches undergraduate writing. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center and published in Radar, Booth, the Santa Clara Review, Cleaver, and other journals. Mellitus is her first book.

If anyone had told Annie Bruno that the novel she thought was on the verge of publication wouldn’t come out for another 30 years, she would never have believed it. How did she sustain her belief? She didn’t. But she found her way back to the novel, and it found its way into the world.

Preorder Until You Find Your Way from Itasca Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop 

What inspired you to write Until You Find Your Way?

The novel began with Beada, inspired by the memory of a childhood friend’s mother who raised horses in rural Minnesota. She was strong, self-assured, and a little loose with rules—qualities that made her magnetic to me as a young girl. After high school I left that rural landscape, but the memory of her never left me. She embodied a physical confidence and groundedness that felt elemental, almost mythic, and I think I carried that image of her into adulthood as a kind of touchstone.

As Beada developed on the page, she became more than that early inspiration. She evolved into a composite of women I’ve known—my mother included—and parts of myself. My mother also carried beauty and strength, though hers was quieter, less overtly rebellious. The tension between those two expressions of womanhood fascinated me. Beada’s story grew into an exploration of the quiet struggle between expectation and inner truth, particularly within family life.

In the novel, Beada is living through that middle terrain in raising a family—those adolescent years—when communication becomes more fraught and expectations go underground. Parents and children begin wrestling privately with identities that no longer align as easily as they once did. The early death of Beada and Porter’s first child intensifies her isolation. Grief becomes an unspoken presence at the table. Everyone longs for connection, yet each retreats inward. That dynamic—yearning and distance existing simultaneously—became the emotional center of the book.

What does “strong” mean to you?

Strength, to me, is the balance between taking responsibility for your life and being willing to ask for what you need. The first requires self-knowledge. You have to understand who you are—what feels true—before you can move toward it. Without that clarity, it’s easy to live according to expectations and then quietly blame others for the dissatisfaction that follows.

That blame can break bonds. In the novel, both generations are coming of age. Beada and Porter are navigating separation—physical and emotional—while their children are trying to define themselves as adults. Father Sean, the third point in the unconventional love triangle, is also caught between duty and authenticity. Each character, in their own way, is trapped in the gap between the life prescribed to them and the life that feels honest.

In fact, the epigraph of the novel is a line from a poem by Eamon Grennan about being trapped. The novel is structured based on that line about a bat caught indoors, out of his element and seeking freedom. All of the novel’s characters are caught like that bat, blind to each other in certain ways as they find their way to that open window where the struggle ends.

Why portray women’s interior lives with such depth?

Our interior lives are the source of common ground that make novels so powerful. As a young reader, novels that revealed women’s private thoughts helped me recognize and trust my own. Their stories made me feel less alone in experiences I was having that no one talked about.

That interest in interiority deepened during my graduate study. I wrote about A Question of Power by Bessie Head, a semi-autobiographical novel exploring identity, exile, and mental illness under apartheid in South Africa. I also studied Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya, which portrays a woman married at twelve and struggling to maintain her resilience during social upheaval in India. Though my life was vastly different—and far easier—these books shaped how I understood interiority as a site of resistance and dignity.

I have also always been interested in the relationship between women’s inner lives and their bodies. Girls often become objects of perception before they have fully formed their own self-understanding. Fiction helps women to distinguish what is true about themselves from what others want them to be. Being able to distinguish that from a young age makes an enormous difference in the paths women take and ultimately how fulfilling their lives become. 

What drew you to explore grief and a love triangle?

Grief asks for a particular kind of intimacy. It is inexpressible, yet it demands expression. When someone experiences profound loss, language often fails. It can feel impossible to be met by another person—emotionally, physically, spiritually—at the depth of that pain.

The love triangle in the novel emerged organically from a confession scene. Beada, who is not religious and feels like an outsider in her small town, nevertheless continued to go to confession after leaving the church because it gave her a space to talk candidly about her own life. After her son’s death, her talks with Father Sean became increasingly essential. They gave her comfort and solace her husband was at a loss to provide. Because of that, she both longed for her connection with Father Sean and resisted it. 

Porter, meanwhile, is not completely absent. He is struggling in his own way to return to the family—to repair what he cannot articulate. He senses Beada’s distance and perceives the presence of a third party but misidentifies both her motivation and the person. As Beada, Porter, and Father Sean collide and retreat, as they deal with the aftershocks of their actions, each must confront what they truly want and what they are willing to sacrifice to get it.

How does the 1993 small-town setting shape the story?

If not set in 1993, the novel could not have unfolded as does. Without the internet, mobile phones, or social media, distance carried real weight. Porter, living abroad in Bangkok, cannot easily bridge the gap with his children in Minnesota. Communication requires effort and is often untimely. Silence lingers longer, and so do secrets. Geographic cures are more effective because emotional separation is inherent in long distances.

For the children, their father’s life in Bangkok feels mysterious, almost mythic, on one hand, but on the other, so far away as to have no real meaning or impact on their own lives, a feeling that extends to their father himself.

The other significant part of the 1990s setting is that the kids grow up and make decisions in relatively privacy, something that doesn’t seem to exist for teens anymore. Emilee’s choices about school and Barry’s unusually mature relationship with an older girl develop without the constant visibility and scrutiny that now seems inherent to adolescent lives. 

What role does storytelling play today, especially for women’s voices?

To me, storytelling remains what it has always been: sharing an experience that can provide an escape or a homecoming for others. It transports us into another consciousness while deepening our own.

What’s different now is that women’s voices feel clearer and more unapologetic in my lifetime. When I listened to Catherine Connolly speak after taking office in Ireland in 2025, I was struck by how grounded her speech felt in priorities often voiced by women—care, equity, interconnectedness. It signaled to me how much space has opened for women to articulate power differently.

Literature and film that center women’s experiences—and pass measures like the Bechdel-Wallace Test—expand that space further. When readers encounter complex female protagonists, they internalize broader definitions of leadership, strength, and vulnerability. Storytelling doesn’t replace policy or activism, but it shapes the emotional landscape in which those forces operate. It builds empathy, and empathy precedes change.

Can you describe your creative process?

My process always begins with an image, whether it’s an image from a memory or something that I see or witness in the moment. When that image is strong enough, a story begins to take shape in my mind. All it takes is one scene that leads to another then another. The potency of that one image, for me, can launch a whole world. I’m not one for outlines, but once I have a first draft, I do map the primary and secondary story arcs. Every character needs to go on a journey of some kind. The need to change and evolve for us to care about them. 

Editing is something I enjoy, so a big part of my process is doing an entire pass on the novel focused on one thing: the transitions between chapters, deepening the sense of place or a certain relationship. I have rewritten more than one novel changing from a first person to third person omniscient narration. That creates a number of interesting tradeoffs: distinct voices for the ability to shift between points of view in a single scene is one example.

Having readers and feedback is a huge part of my process too. Finding a close reader who wants to help you is an enormous gift. I had several who helped Until You Find Your Way become what it is today. 

What challenges did you face?

The hardest challenge was sustaining belief. Writing a novel requires enormous patience—not only with the work but with yourself. Your understanding of truth evolves as you age. Sometimes a new insight demands a structural change that ripples through hundreds of pages. You can spend months reworking a single motivation.

There were moments when trusted readers questioned revisions I knew were necessary. Holding onto my own sense of the book’s direction, even when external validation wavered, was the most difficult task. Yet those revisions ultimately made the novel deeper and more aligned with what felt meaningful to me. What I guess I’m saying is that sometimes you, as the writer, know best, and backing yourself can be harder than you think it will be.

What was your journey to publication like?

Long and nonlinear. I began the novel in my early twenties. The first draft was 575 pages, mailed in a cardboard box to an agent. It was once close to publication—an editor even took me to lunch in a restaurant where John F. Kennedy Jr. was at an adjacent table—but it ultimately did not sell.

I was devastated. I concluded, incorrectly, that I had written the wrong kind of book. For years I tried other forms—short stories, essays, a screenplay, a young adult novel. Those explorations were valuable, but they also delayed my return to this manuscript.

Then, in 2021, I was visiting a childhood friend who was dying of cancer. She asked about my first novel, and I told her it was sitting on a shelf. She said, so simply, “You have to publish it.” I knew in that moment I would, somehow. When I read it again, after so many years, I realized the book still mattered to me. 

When I was ready to try again to find a publisher for Until You Find Your Way, I chose not to use an agent. Instead, I researched contests and submitted to the Howling Bird Press Fiction Prize. Only later did I realize the press was affiliated with Augsburg University, my undergraduate alma mater. When the novel won, it felt unexpectedly full circle. The book had found its home in the same state where it was born imaginatively and where I first began to write seriously.

What do you hope readers take away?

I hope readers find strength for whatever they are facing. If the characters’ choices reveal an opening—a possibility for courage, reconciliation, or self-recognition—that would mean that my novel did what so many novels have done for me. I’m so grateful to so many writers, and this is my attempt to return that intimate experience.

And I do think reading fiction, in particular, is inherently intimate. You sit alone, yet you are accompanied deeply. My hope is that this book offers that companionship. If it makes lasting friends, then it has done more than I could have ever asked of it.

Congrats to the Winner and finalists of the 2026 Howling Bird Press Nonfiction Contest (listed in alphabetical order)

A profile about the author and winning manuscript will be released on our website in April.

2026 Howling Bird Press Nonfiction Prize Winner

Mellitus: Essays on Up/Rooting by Jennifer Jussel

Finalists

Elegy, 1991 by J. A. Bernstein

The Rabbit Witch Spell Book by Sheri Rysdam

Three Strands: Essays on Love, Food, and Loss by Judith Sharlin

My Ghost Fleet by Faith Shearin

Thank you to all our incredible submitters. We were blown away by the quality of the submissions we received and had an incredibly difficult time narrowing down to these semifinalists and finalists. We appreciate the talent, time, and dedication that goes into putting together such works and look forward to seeing you continue to blow readers away in your future writing endeavors!

The winner of Howling Bird Press’s 2025 Fiction Prize is Annie Bruno, for her novel Until You Find Your Way. Her novel will be published by Howling Bird Press this March, and is available for preorder now from Itasca Books!

Until You Find Your Way by Annie Bruno (forthcoming March 23, 2026)

Fiction

Preorder from Itasca Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop 

In the aftermath of losing their eldest child, Beada and Porter have become an estranged couple, living on different continents. She’s in rural Minnesota raising their two other teens, while Porter visits from Bangkok “when he can,” disguising his pain as arrogance. When Beada’s only outlet—careful, unorthodox confessions to the local priest—take an abrupt turn, a quiet but seismic shift forces everyone in the family to decide what they cannot live without.

“With precise, exquisite prose, Bruno illuminates the relationship between loss and desire and how the heart can find its way when it learns to let go.” —Cassandra Garbus, author of Solo Variations and winner of the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize

Congrats to the Finalists of the 2025 Howling Bird Press Fiction Contest (listed in alphabetical order)

A winner will be selected from this finalist list and announced by February 2025.

• The Field Road, Annie Bruno
• Extinction for Beginners, Randi Hacker
• Filthy Rich, or Average Life Expectancy at the End of the World, Terra Travis
• Palace, Em Williamson
• Do You Remember Me?, Jeffrey Winter

And congratulations to our semifinalists:

• What Was Left Became Its Body, Brenna Lee
• Creeper, Taylor Sykes

Thank you to all our incredible submitters. We were blown away by the quality of the submissions we received and had an incredibly difficult time narrowing down to these semifinalists and finalists. We appreciate the talent, time, and dedication that goes into putting together such works and look forward to seeing you continue to blow readers away in your future writing endeavors!

Howling Bird Press is pleased to announce that Emily Hyland is the winner of the 2024 Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript Divorced Business Partners. The manuscript was selected by students at Augsburg University’s MFA program from a short-list of nine finalists and will be published by Howling Bird Press in fall 2024.

Divorced Business Partners follows spouses as they take on a business venture and open a restaurant. The little business quickly becomes successful, but their marriage collapses in the process. Before they know it, husband and wife are nothing more than divorced business partners.

Emily Hyland’s poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Hollins Critic, among others. She earned her MFA in poetry and her MA in English education from Brooklyn College. Her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, in 2018. Hyland is the eponymous co-founder of the international restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily + Emmy Squared Pizza. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she writes and teaches yoga. emilyhyland.com / emmysquaredpizza.com / pizzalovesemily.com

Howling Bird Press, the publishing house of Augsburg University’s MFA in Creative Writing, offers an annual prize that results in book publication. As a teaching press, we are staffed by graduate students enrolled in our Publishing Concentration. Our prize alternates genres annually, from poetry to fiction to nonfiction. In April 2024, we will open for submissions for our Fiction prize. We hope to see your manuscript then.

Congrats to the Finalists of the 2024 Howling Bird Press Poetry Contest (listed in alphabetical order)

A winner will be selected from this finalist list in January 2024 and announced by February.

• Villain(era), John Andrews
• subway psalms, Tamar Ashdot
• Venus of the Midwest, Justine Defever
• Divorced Business Partners, Emily Hyland
• Gothic, April Lindner
• Thirsty, C. Eliot Mullins
• Imagine a Woman, Dorothy Neagle
• Heartbreak and Spaceships in the Age of Extraterrestrials, Osmani Ochoa
• Mending of a Body, TW Sia

And congratulations to our semifinalists:

• Finding Meteorites in Antarctica, Paul Brooke
• The Book of Drought, Robert Carney
• Fortuna Redux, Faith Ellington
• The Stoop and the Steeple, Nancy Meyer
• Refugee, Erika Michael
• All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths, Samodh Porawagamage
• Otherly, Rebecca Reynolds
• Rooting for Spices, Rod Carlos Rodriguez
• A Wonder of Furies, Stella Witcher

Thank you to all our incredible submitters. We were blown away by the quality of the submissions we received and had an incredibly difficult time narrowing down to these semifinalists and finalists. We appreciate the talent, time, and dedication that goes into putting together such works and look forward to seeing you continue to blow readers away in your future writing endeavors!

Our latest title, Carrie Grinstead’s I Have Her Memories Now, has placed on Small Press Distribution’s bestseller list! Cheers to Carrie as well as to our dedicated editors and interns!

The Masters Review has posted a wonderful review of our 2022 Fiction Prize winner, I Have Her Memories Now by Carrie Grinstead! Reviewer Cole Meyer writes, “Grinstead brings her remarkable talent to each story in this slim collection. There are only six stories, but every single line earns its stay. Grinstead shows again and again that she has a gift for the surprising but inevitable conclusion, and it’s no wonder Howling Bird Press selected this collection for this year’s book prize. The path of each of these stories is so particular, I can’t imagine any writer other than Grinstead having penned them.” To read the full review, visit The Masters Review here.

From April 2 through July 31, 2022, we are accepting submissions in nonfiction. The press welcomes innovative, original work from established and emerging authors. The competition is open to all writers in English living in the U.S., whether published or unpublished. Manuscript length should be between 20,000 and 60,000 words. File formats should be either Word .doc or .docx. Pages should be numbered; include author’s name and address.

Include a cover letter in the form provided online, and list contact information and a short (100 to 200 word) bio. There is a $25 entry fee. Current and former students of Augsburg’s MFA in Creative Writing are ineligible, as are current faculty and staff of Augsburg University. Submitters must be the original author, not an agent of/for the author. The winner is announced in January 2023. The winner receives $2,500 and book publication in fall 2023. 

Howling Bird Press books are distributed by Small Press Distribution, and are available at online retailers and in bookstores nationwide.

https://augsburghowlingbirdpress.submittable.com/submit