Jamie Zerndt

One year after his father's suicide, Carson Long feels cheated. He hates his father for leaving him and his sister, Georgie, alone. He hates him for turning his mother into a young widow who hasn't left the house in months. And he hates his father for leaving behind his stupid tree. Four of them are planted outside the restaurant, one for each family member. That is until Carson's mother, no longer able to stand the sight of the tree, hires a local landscaper to remove it in the middle of the night. This seemingly unremarkable act soon sets in motion of series of events in the small Colorado ski town that leaves more than just young Carson groping in the dark for answers. The Roadrunner Cafe is a unique novel told from multiple points of view about loss and the lengths some will go to heal the human heart. Ultimately, it is a story about what it takes to go on living even when everything in the world might be telling us it isn't possible to."

The Roadrunner Cafe

A collection of short poems from over the years, a handful of which have previously appeared either online or in places like Edgar Literary Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Nerve Cowboy, and The Oregonian Newspaper. Chapbook length: approximately 50 poems Note: A handful of these poems appear in The Cloud Seeders

Everyone's Happier Than You

Set in Mercer, Wisconsin, where tensions over Native American fishing rights are escalating, JERKWATER is told from three alternating points-of-view: Shawna Reynolds, a young Ojibwa woman who doesn’t much care for white people to begin with, and who is quickly being pulled in a direction she may no longer have a desire to resist; Kay O’Brien, Shawna’s 64-year-old, usually drunk, neighbor who is still grieving the loss of her husband; And Kay’s son, Douglas, who now finds himself in charge of running the family’s auto repair shop while dealing with his own feelings of guilt. JERKWATER is a story about the racial tensions churning just beneath the surface of what often appears to be placid, everyday American life.

Jamie Zerndt

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