Hub City Press to publish Martha Parks' essays, WORLD WITHOUT END

Hub City Press is pleased to announce that it will publish writer and illustrator Martha Park's debut essay collection, WORLD WITHOUT END, in 2025.

From man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina; from a full-scale replica of Noah's Ark in Kentucky to the author's own Memphis backyard, these inquisitive, evocative essays consider the way our religious and spiritual backgrounds shape the way we interact with the world. Along the way, Park, who grew up a preacher's daughter, considers how new interpretations of ritual, sacred texts, and our own relationships with the places and people we call home can compel us to new forms of faith, divorced from dogma or orthodoxy, that bind us closer to the world and renew our faith in community and care. A remarkable blend of reportage, research, and memoir, WORLD WITHOUT END will attract readers who are troubled by the current state of American politics, interested in stories about the South that challenge stereotypes, and curious about the ways that faith might be transformed, pulled down from heaven back to earth. 

Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University, and was the Spring 2016 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She is a 2022-2023 Fellow with the Religion & Environment Story Project and a recipient of the William Graves Sackett Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, Granta, Ecotone, ProPublica, and elsewhere.

Editor Katherine Webb-Hehn says, "Martha has collected essays about apocalypses: fundamentalist-envisioned end-times, climate change and all the ways our natural world is being undone, burial rituals. A throughline throughout the examination of each of these endings is an ending that undid her own faith: her father retiring from his minister position after 40 years during the pandemic."