JEANNE LEIBY grew up downriver Detroit. She graduated from the University of Michigan, earned her MA from the Bread Loaf School of English/Middlebury College, and her MFA from the University of Alabama. Her stories, many of them collected here, have appeared in Fiction, New Orleans Review, The Greensboro Review, and Indiana Review, among others. For ten years, she has lived in Orlando, Florida, teaching creative writing at the University of Central Florida and editing The Florida Review. In 2008, she will move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University and editor of The Southern Review.
“I love the sharp edges of Jeanne Leiby's tightly packed stories, and how she brings out the dignity of these hard lives without romanticizing or sentimentalizing her characters. Nothing is free or easy in these stories, but there is no self-pity. There is only survival in a working-class world of seen and unseen boundaries. Bargains are struck, compromises are made, secrets are kept, all in the name of survival. All over America, communities 'Down River' struggle to carry on. They are driven past, ignored by everyone who doesn¹t live there. But we can all learn a lot about getting by from the gritty characters populating the community of this rich, unforgettable collection."
JIM DANIELS
“Downriver is cloud of coal dust, a river in the shadow of the Enrico Fermi Cooling Plant. There’s beauty to found in slag and ruined rivers; there’s much that we who’ve lived in these places carry with us. Maybe sometimes we want to say I’m from someplace else. But we know in our hearts that Detroit, Gary, or Pittsburgh are places of beauty too. Leiby says, ‘Watch the smokestack flames perpetually burning off methane gases like the eternal flame, and then you tell me this place doesn’t look like the Emerald City.’ It does; I’ve seen it.”
RICK CAMPBELL