How to Live

About the Author

Kelle Groom is the author of the memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. An NEA Fellow in Prose and 2020 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, Groom’s work appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Spill (Anhinga Press). Groom is on the poetry and nonfiction faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada University, Lake Tahoe, nonfiction editor at AGNI, and director of communications and foundation relations at Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Prior Honors for I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl

• Library Journal Best Memoir of 2011

• Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers”

• Oxford American magazine Editor’s Pick

• New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection

• O Magazine Oprah Summer Reading List selection

• Barnes & Noble “Best Book of the Month” selection

• NPR “Books We Like” selection

• Harper’s Bazaar “Summer’s Reading List.”

Prior Honors for Poetry

• Best American Essays 2021 selection for “Star Tables”

• Special Mention in 2021 Pushcart Prize XLV Best of the Small Presses for “The Year Without Summer”

• Pushcart Prize nomination for “The Year Without Summer,” About Place Journal

• Best of the Web Series nomination for “River of Grass,” Cincinnati Review

• Pushcart Prize nomination for “Incurable,” Provincetown Arts Magazine

• Pushcart Prize nomination for “Hour,” No Tokens

• New York Times and Poetry Foundation “Poetry Pairings” selection, “Swerve”

• Best American Poetry 2010, “Oh dont”

• Entertainment Weekly “Best New Poetry,” Five Kingdoms

Advanced Praise

It’s really a book where the tissue between life and death feels very thin at times and Kelle Groom negotiates these mortal stations like a wandering medieval saint on residencies and short term teaching jobs who finds consolation, wisdom and suicidal despair in “violet rain”, flashes of feeling in the grasp of a hand, while the euphoria of love and eloquent scraps of knowledge keenly ornament this trail where being “a bare faced reader” is precisely enough. Kelle Groom writes with a relentless and avid consciousness and in this story there is a child and I think it her own becoming. —Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls and Afterglow

Kelle Groom is a navigator of the soul’s voyage, from mooring to mooring, no matter the tumultuous seas. She is a writer of deepest heart and purest eye, who seizes you and takes you where she wanders. How to Live is one of the most beautiful books I know, a profound reckoning. —Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships

At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be– a way to live– after a series of devastating events. But there’s nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book. —Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain

Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? This is a central question in this fiercely won, wildly original, and ultimately beautiful meditation. Kelle Groom is one of our most gifted writers, and this book is her Odyssey, which means we will end up back where we started, only changed. Along the way we will visit strange lands, we will come face-to-face with our fears, we will find ourselves among kind strangers, and we will understand why we are alive. This is a book which wrestles with our hardest, darkest questions, and comes out on the side of gratitude. —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

Format: Paperback
Published: October 2023
ISBN: 978-1-946482-83-9