The Year of the Return
by Nathaniel Popkin
Nathaniel Popkin is a nationally recognized writer and editor of fiction and non-fiction, film, criticism, and journalism. He is the author of three books of non-fiction and two novels, including Everything is Borrowed (New Door Books) and Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), which re-imagines the life and tragic death of the first great American genre painter, John Lewis Krimmel. Lion and Leopard was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Indie Book of the Year Award. He is also the co-editor of a recent anthology, Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press). In 2018, he turned his attention to the ecological crisis, describing the present era as an “age of loss” in a short essay in The New York Times.
Popkin has been a Fellow of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Writer-in-Residence at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and Jefferson University, and an artist-in-residence at Rivendell Writers Colony in Tennessee and the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Iceland. Popkin is the writer of the 2018 film documentary “Sisters in Freedom,” the extraordinary story of the trailblazing women who crossed racial lines in the fight to end slavery. He is the recipient of several Emmy Awards for documentary film writing.
Popkin is co-founder of the web magazine Hidden City Daily and the reviews editor of Cleaver Magazine. His literary criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet, Public Books, and Rain Taxi, among many other publications. As a close observer of Philadelphia and American urban history, Popkin has sought a fresh way to understand urban change through layers of human endeavor. His 2017 book Finding the Hidden City follows on 2008’s The Possible City and 2002’s Song of the City. He was the guest architecture critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer from 2011-12.
The Year of the Return
The Year of the Return is a vivid story of families trying to reconnect with and support each other through trauma and loss, and a meditation on the possibility of moving on to a better future.
Books by Nathaniel Popkin
Nathaniel Popkin
