FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD (BERRU AWARD)   FINALIST FOR THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARD   Two families immigrate to America's Steel Valley and open a trucking motel and laundry. The businesses change hands through three generations as the region's industry booms and busts. When the two disparate families become one, the new generation must examine what it means to endure in a place, a culture, a language, and a history. Line Study of a Motel Clerk examines a family's century-long effort to make a home in a world on the move. "Allison Pitinii Davis speaks Ohioan, as James Wright wryly put it, and gives us a world in this utterly fresh, well-crafted, and exhilarating debut volume."-- EDWARD HIRSCH , author of Gabriel (Knopf) Allison Pitinii Davis’s Line Study of a Motel Clerk Finalist for Jewish National Book Awards Berru Award in Poetry FOR IMMEDATE RELEASE CONTACT: Danilo Thomas ● 775–786–1188 ● danilo@baobabpress.com http://baobabpress.com/books/line-study-of-a-motel-clerk/ Reno, Nevada – Baobab Press is proud to announce that Allison Pitinii Davis’s poetry collection, Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press), found itself among distinguished company on a list of finalists for the Berru Poetry Award that includes Late Beauty by Tuvia Ruebner (Zephyr Press), Galaxy Love: Poems by Gerald Stern (W. W. Norton & Company), and the Berru Award Winner, Waiting for the Light, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker (University of Pittsburgh Press). The esteemed Berru Award is presented by The National Jewish Book Awards, a program the Jewish Book Council began in 1950. Allison Pitinii Davis was born and raised outside of Youngstown, Ohio, Pitinii Davis holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her 2013 chapbook, “Poppy Seeds,” won the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. Line Study of a Motel Clerk examines a family’s century-long effort to make a home in a changing world. Pitinii Davis takes readers on an eye-opening journey through her family lineage, with all the grit, beauty and truth of the working-class immigrant struggle. One side of the family opens a trucking motel, the other a laundry. The businesses change hands through three generations as the industrial steel valley booms and busts. When these two disparate families become one, the new generation must question what it means to endure a place, a culture, a language, and a history. Allison Pitinii Davis is available for interviews and appearances. To book media appearances, interviews, and book-signings, please contact casey@baobabpress.com "In Line Study of a Motel Clerk, Allison Pitinii Davis explores the complicated intersections among ethnicity, family, work, and loss that shaped the culture of Youngstown. The language and images are specific, and while some readers may well recall their own visits to the steel museum or the sounds of local bands and radio stations, these poems are not merely local. Instead, they invite us to think about the meaning of place--about how we come to be in particular places and how our lives are shaped by those who came earlier, from other places. These poems remind us that a sense of place is rooted in family stories, in the material spaces of small businesses and local bars, in words and memories."-- SHERRY LEE LINKON , author of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (University Press of Kansas) "This book refuses the notion that poetry is an enterprise of the elite. In Line Study of a Motel Clerk , interstate truck drivers, laundrymen, and desk clerks have as much wisdom and beauty to offer as Reznikoff, Spinoza, and Mayakovsky. Allison Pitinii Davis knows that the poet, too is a worker, "straightening / endings and beginnings / into a line." As a daughter of converging diasporas, she is a "great bearer of keys," opening doors to a family history that reveals the links between language and survival, between past and present, between the personal and the political. This is vital poetry of the working class, for whom "Saying nothing's beyond / our means."... Davis does more than pay tribute to her home, a place shrouded in dark myth: she dives into the wreck, questions her place there, and pulls up the truth."-- ROCHELLE HURT , author of The Rusted City (White Pine Press) "In this unforgettable debut, Allison Pitinii Davis tells the American story of two immigrant families: the Jews own a Rust Belt motel, the Greeks run a laundry; they ultimately merge to create the speaker of these eloquent, unsentimental poems, that remind me so happily of William Carlos Williams and Philip Levine. Line Study of a Motel Clerk is a story of transience and love--"the heart of it all + a free beer"--of looking almost too closely, forward through the windshield and back into the past. "There is a way to love things open," Davis writes of the duplicate