“Between her childhood in communist Poland, her coming-of-age in 1990s America, and her present-day life as a mother of three, Magdalena Bartkowska beautifully conjures what it means to ache for the past while turning toward the future … [her memoir-in-essays] made me think deeply and feel deeply in equal measure—that most magical of combinations—forever altering my sense of what it means to be ‘at home.’”

—Nicole Graev Lipson, USA Today bestselling author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

What does it mean to move through the world as an immigrant and a woman?

When Magda Bartkowska is seven years old, her family emigrates from Poland to the United States, where she grows up fractured by the loss of identity and her center of gravity. The freedom promised by the American Dream proves elusive, as the weight of expectations imposed onto women and mothers breaks her again in midlife. Like the pink daisies she used to collect in front of her Stalinist-era blok, she gathers the pieces and attempts to rearrange them into her own definition of belonging.  

Through lyrical prose woven with research, Bartkowska examines how the bonds we forge can both protect and wound. From the Black Madonna to red geraniums to Polish translations of Anne of Green Gables, she interrogates the stories she’s inherited about anger and agency, communist Poland, her worth as an immigrant, mother-daughter conflict, and the idea of home. Fierce and evocative, Bartkowska’s memoir-in-essays is a remarkable exploration of shedding constructs that no longer serve us, and how returning to ourselves can transform the way we see the world and our own place within its shifting narratives

“A thought-provoking collection for anyone straddling cultures and languages in search of a voice that is truly their own.” 

—Ani Gjika, author of An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir

“…a story of resilience and grit told with a rare intelligence.”

—Celia Jeffries, author of Blue Desert

“…a most memorable read by one new voice with a foot in two worlds as she creates a new one, a writer to follow wherever life takes her.”

               —Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of Polish-American books including Compositions: A memoir in 42 essays by 1 kid on her 8 years in Catholic School, handed in 60 Years late 

FORTHCOMING FALL 2027

Magdalena Bartkowska was born in Gdańsk, Poland and raised in western Massachusetts, where she lives with her family. A former third-grade teacher, Magda was a 2026 finalist for the Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writers-in-Residence program. Her essays appear in Meat for Tea, Manifest Station, Vast Chasm Magazine, and Barnstorm Journal, among other publications, and her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and shortlisted for The Sonora Review Rage Essay Contest. Magda is a freelance editor; a memoir she copyedited won the New Mexico Book Association’s Southwest Book Design and Production Award. She is working on her second book, a historical research project excavating the lost story of the Mansfield sisters from North Adams, MA, and she serves as a board member for The Mansfield Sisters Festival.