Member Hosted Event: SDB Author Event

Join Sleepy Dog Books in welcoming two Michigan Writers Chapbook Contest Winners of 2025, Wendy Gilbert Gronbeck and Helen Racia-Klotz!

Wendy’s non-fiction book, Gifts from the Edge of Life: Reflections of a Grateful Nurse, gives us the stories of people for whom she has cared and supported during her time as a former hospice nurse. Phillip Sterling, (author of Lessons in Geography and In Which Brief Stories are Told, among other work) says, “This book gives the reader an intimate look at what people at their most vulnerable -- during times of life-threatening or life-ending illness -- can teach the rest of us about acceptance, perseverance, grace. Wendy Gronbeck reminds us that there is 'more to life than living.' These stories are gifts worth sharing.”

​Helen's book, Superior Stories, is a series of six short stories which explore the lives of people who live in the northernmost part of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Keweenaw. Bryan Gruley (award-winning author of Bitterfrost, Starvation Lake, and other novels) notes, "In her linked story collection, Raica-Klotz conjures evocative settings and richly layered up-north characters with language that is at once concrete and elegiac, painting a hard yet enchanting landscape of tarpaper roofs, black ice, and hoar frost -- a travelogue of human hope and grief, aspiration and desperation."