The cover of Miss Fuller shows a stormy sea seen from the coast, ostensibly New York's Fire Island, where, in 1850, Margaret Fuller perished in a shipwreck with her Italian husband and two-year-old son. The tragic dimensions of Fuller's life and death are narrated from the points of view of various characters belonging to the Concord Transcendentalists, who had awaited her return. Henry David Thoreau, traveling to Fire Island hoping to find manuscripts among the soaked debris that washed ashore after the hurricane passed, finds something else instead, which forms the fictionalized framework of Bernard's 2012 work.

April Bernard is a novelist, poet, and essayist whose most recent book of poems is Romanticism (2009). Previous poetry collections are Blackbird Bye Bye, Psalms, and Swan Electric. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and Slate. She has taught widely and was for many years a magazine and book editor in New York City. Her honors include a Guggenheim award, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Whitney Humanities Fellowship at Yale University, a Sidney Harman Fellowship, and the Stover Prize. As Director of Creative Writing, she is a member of the English Department faculty at Skidmore College, and is also on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars. Her five favorite novels are listed under The South End Reads tab of the FOSEL web site.

Ms. Bernard will read from Miss Fuller as well as from her poetry collection, Romanticism. Both books will be available for sale, signing and borrowing from the library. The writer will be introduced by author Doug Bauer, also on the faculty of Bennington College, whose next collection of essays --What Happens Next?--will be published this fall.

On February 26, the South End Writes will host nationally known writer Andre Dubus III, who will read from Townie, a Memoir.