Praise for Steve Mitchell

“This time I’m not walking. I am a still point. This time, I merely sit quietly and allow the full weight of joy, of family, of the love we share, to bear me forward into a moment of glory where for one single and splendid instant I am absolutely one with every soul around me and the terror of it burns me clean.” This is perhaps the most telling passage in Steve Mitchell’s impressive volume because it reveals in dramatic though indirect fashion one theme common to almost all the stories in The Naming of Ghosts: the unabideable fear of loneliness, the need to escape by any means the solitary confinement of self. Albert Camus would admire this book.
—Fred Chappell, North Carolina Literary Review

Steve Mitchell’s lyrical prose and beautifully crafted stories haunt the reader long after the final pages. His characters are so full and fascinating, and the urgency of their need to connect is so strong. Poignant, inspiring, and compelling, The Naming of Ghosts is the finest collection of stories out there.
—Frances Badgett, Contrary Magazine

Mitchell’s storytelling is remarkable in its hypnotic rhythms, in the unique voice. Story after story in The Naming of Ghosts stays with us long after the ending. This is an impressive collection that must be read, and read again.
—Alexander Pepple, Able Muse

At its great and generous heart, Cloud Diary, then, is a turn of the new millennium love story . . . Mitchell creates a love story at once engaging and unnervingly immediate. What stuns here is the unforced elegance of Mitchell’s anatomy of love, his willingness to use language unironically to capture that mysterious kinetic.
—Joseph Dewey, North Carolina Literary Review

A delightful and accomplished novel. Cloud Diary is a winning blend of metaphysics and box wine, of sticky-floored dive bars and lofty artistic passions. Steve Mitchell renders love and mortality with precision and without sentimentality. Nuanced and compassionate, Cloud Diary is a tribute to the ever presence of the past, and how it might help us become whole.
—Michael Parker, author of Everything Then and Since

“A beautiful, bittersweet novel about first love—how it forms us, how it settles in us and lingers, consoling us even to the end of our days.”
—Kim Church, author of Byrd

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Steve Mitchell has published in the Iron Horse Review, CRAFT Literary, Harpur Palate, entropy, december magazine, Southeast Review, and the North Carolina Literary Review, among others. Cloud Diary (a novel) was published in 2018 by C&R Press and The Naming of Ghosts (a short story collection) was published in 2013 by Press 53. He is a winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, judged by Lily King, the Lorian Hemingway International Short Story Prize, and the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize.  He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Editor at Scuppernong Editions.