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Book Cover for: The Pink Institution, Selah Saterstrom

The Pink Institution

Selah Saterstrom

Beautiful and violent, spare and ominous, this wholly original novel explodes mythologies of southern femininity.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Coffee House Press
  • Publish Date: Apr 1st, 2004
  • Pages: 140
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.40in - 4.90in - 0.40in - 0.35lb
  • EAN: 9781566891554
  • Categories: Historical - GeneralLiterary

About the Author

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, all published by Coffee House Press. Widely published and anthologized, she also curates Madame Harriette Presents, an occasional series. She teaches and lectures across the United States and is the director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Born in 1974, Saterstrom grew up in Natchez, Jackson, and Pass Christian, Mississippi. She earned her bachelor's degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, her Masters in Theology and Literature from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and her MFA from Goddard College in Vermont. She is the editor of Soul Collections, an anthology of prose and poetry written by at-risk teenagers in North Carolina and her work has recently appeared in Big Bridge, the Café Review, Fourteen Hills, Tarpaulin Sky, the American Book Review, Ellipsis, Cranbrook Magazine, and elsewhere. The Meat and Spirit Plan is her second novel and a portion of the author's proceeds will be donated to Our Voice, a nonprofit crisis intervention agency serving Western North Carolina and to the Kim Duckett Fund for Women.

A former instructor at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, Saterstrom currently lives in Colorado and is on the faculty of the University of Denver's Creative Writing Program.

Praise for this book


"Saterstrom writes with a poet's economy and eye for visceral detail, collapsing into a mere 140 pages a four-generation history of a Southern family bedeviled by alcoholism, poverty, racism, violence, and mental illness. Her spareness is a mercy. The story she tells is brutal, almost impossible to take; at the same time, her exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language makes this book impossible to put down." --The Huffington Post, "11 Underappreciated Literary Masterpieces"