"Throughout, her love of language remains uniquely her own, enabling her to weave a beautifully crafted tapestry of image and insight that ultimately enables her to string together a fragmented self." —Nancy McCabe, Ploughshares

"Readers who wander into Lori Jakiela’s world fall into a broken-in honesty, full of warmth and wit. It’s like hanging with your best friend, only with more wry humor, withering candor, and the lack of affect which is the best of the rust belt." —Jody DiPerna, Pittsburgh Current

Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the 2016 William Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazine and Small Presses Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Literary Award, and named one of 20 Not-to-Miss Books of Nonfiction of 2015 by The Huffington Post. Jakiela is the author of an essay collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker (Bottom Dog Press), as well as two other memoirs—Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette) and The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press). She is also the author of the poetry collection Spot the Terrorist (Turning Point) and several limited-edition poetry chapbooks. Her latest poetry chapbook, Big Fish, was published by Stranded Oak Press in 2016. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Rumpus, Brevity, and more.