The Raindrop's Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome and St. Paula - Tapa blanda

Poetry. THE RAINDROP'S GOSPEL: THE TRIALS OF ST. JEROME AND ST. PAULA is the winner of the Ninth Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. It is a novel in verse chronicling the lives of St. Jerome and St. Paula. In the afterword to the book, Chris Abani had this to say: "Feminist, heretical, apocryphal, theological, inspirational, this book is as much about art and the artist's attempt to render the ineffable as it is about the specificity of the lives of the two saints. Even its take on feminism is heretical. Instead of attempting an alternative construction of the strong female, the book comes at this politics from the position of the male, underpinning the fragility of masculinity, and thus emphasizing so beautifully the strength of women."

Maurya Simon has published nine poetry volumes, including Ghost Orchid, a 2004 National Book Award nominee, and Cartographies, published in October 2008. Simon's ninth volume, THE RAINDROP'S GOSPEL, will be published in 2010 by Elixir Press. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright/Indo-American Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. She has also been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators (Sweden), and Hawthornden Castle (Scotland). Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Farsi, French, Bengali, and Rumanian. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.