Patricia Henley’s fifth collection of short stories, Apple & Palm, was published by Cornerstone Press in 2026. She is the author of three novels, five collections of stories, two chapbooks of poetry, and a stage play. Her first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for The National Book Award and The New Yorker Fiction Prize. Haywire Books published a 20th Anniversary Edition of Hummingbird House in November, 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and other journals. Her first collection of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star (Graywolf), won the Montana First Book Award. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Circle of Women, The Last Best Place, and other anthologies. For 26 years she taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University. She teaches a monthly Zoom workshop for women writers and lives in Kingston, Washington.  

The town of Whistle Pig, like the mountains that surround it, can appear unchanging, as immutable as geography. The lives of the characters in the linked stories in Patricia Henley's Apple & Palm contrast with that predictability. After vowing he'd never go home to Appalachia, DJ Diggs returns from Chicago to his family of origin after a Pride Prom fire that leaves his niece disfigured; Roxy, a centenarian, convinces her grandson's pregnant wife to move into the artist's co-op; Ham Zebrak and Adele Pratt, an elderly pair, spend the night together trying to stir up the ghost of sexual chemistry. Apple & Palm is a provocative close-up examination of aging, memory, and desire. Sentence by sentence, Patricia Henley shows why she is a master of the short story craft. 

Want to learn more about this book directly from the author? You can find her essay discussing the candid origins of the stories found in Apple & Palm online here at The Writer's Chronicle.

You can find Patricia Henley on Facebook, BlueSky (@trix6911.bsky.social), and online at patriciahenleyauthor.com