Tags: debut authors

Today, Karl Marlantes's debut novel is garnering praise for its vivid, trenchant portrayal of American soldiers in the thick of the Vietnam War. But for more than thirty years, the manuscript languished in literary purgatory, while the author struggled to find an agent—not to mention a publisher—willing to take it on. 

Kathryn Starbuck has been around poets and poetry all her life, but she never wrote a single poem herself until about seven years ago, when she was grieving over the recent deaths of her parents, brother, and especially her beloved husband, the poet George Starbuck, who died in 1996 at the age of sixty-five, after a twenty-two-year battle with Parkinson’s Disease.