Michele Filgate
“But there are some sounds I squeeze myself into; I want to be held hostage, I want to be blindfolded so that I’m surrounded by nothingness; opened up by sudden thunder outside of my window, clean rain bouncing off of the peeling deck, hissing, warm, cloud tongue on earth, dirt becoming saliva.”
“These are the hardest stories in the world to tell, but they are told with absolute grace. You will devour these beautifully written—and very important— tales of honesty, pain, and resilience.”
“This collection of storytelling constellated around mothers and silence will break your heart and then gently give it back to you stitched together with what we carry in our bodies our whole lives. Mother is a real place where narratives are generated and negated endlessly. This book hums a body—sometimes to home, sometimes to leaving—both saving our lives.”
Michele Filgate is a writer and the editor of the acclaimed essay collection, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence (Simon & Schuster, April 2019), which grew out of Filgate’s widely read Longreads essay on her troubled relationship with her mother, and includes essays by Alexander Chee, Kiese Laymon, and Leslie Jamison, among many others. It is a Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten Nonfiction book for Spring 2019. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Refinery29, Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Salon, Interview Magazine, Buzzfeed, The Barnes & Noble Review, Poets & Writers, CNN.com, Fine Books & Collections Magazine, DAME Magazine, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Time Out New York, People, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, Men's Journal, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Star Tribune, The Quarterly Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.
Filgate is a prominent literary citizen, having served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and is an active promoter of books and writers she admires. When asked by Brooklyn Magazine how being a writer and literary citizen complement each other, Filgate responded, “Being a literary citizen and a writer go hand in hand, in my opinion. I teach and am on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and write because I care about words. Words are as fundamental to me as breath.”
She teaches creative nonfiction for The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop and Catapult and is the founder of the Red Ink series, which focuses exclusively on women writers. In 2016, Brooklyn Magazine named her one of "The 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture." She is currently a contributing editor at LiteraryHub . She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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