UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS, 2019
Winner of the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Lit. (Nonfiction)
Winner of the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Pinksy Givon Family Prize for Nonfiction
Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Award
Available as an audiobook at Audible, Kobo, and Hoopla.
Interview on CJSW: Writer's Block
Review on CBC: Daybreak Alberta
Review in Alberta Views
"Wry, moving and beautifully written—Naomi Lewis is a wonderful writer."
- Alison Pick
"Early on in
Tiny Lights for Travellers, author Naomi Lewis admits she is a poor traveller. She is, however, a master navigator of her own interior geography. In this quiet, humble and profoundly openhearted memoir, Lewis maps her family’s history, her relationship to faith, and the loves she has both lost and gained. As a reader, I feel thankful to have been invited on the journey."
- Marcello Di Cintio
"An irresistibly wise, poignant, and often funny memoir, a spiral dance through time and space exploring memory, desire, the roots of family, race and religion; as well as what it means to belong in one’s own skin."
- Lauren B. Davis
"I was deeply engaged with Naomi’s journey through Europe while also curious about and interested in the memories of her family life, her marriage, her questions of identity, and a burgeoning love story. A hugely intelligent and creative memoir."
- Lauren Carter
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS, 2013
Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards' silver medal (Anthology)
Interview on CBC: The Next Chapter
Article in the Calgary Herald
Article in 49th Shelf
Review in the Canadian Review of Materials
Review in the Coastal Spectator
"For people who have never thought of themselves as shy personalities, the various voices of “shyness” that richly crowd the pages of this anthology represent a chorus of eloquent witnesses to tell us that perhaps we are all shy, to one degree or another. In prose and poetry, writers from across Canada and beyond wrestle with their demons in metaphors, images and narratives that left me in no doubt of the torment and grievous sense of loss and isolation that some forms of shyness inflict on the writer, shyness as dread and humiliation and pathology. There is also – arising from the amazing variety of experience attested to in
Shy - what I now think of as ethical shyness, linguistic shyness, gendered shyness, discerning shyness, self-blaming shyness, situational shyness. Yet, we are left with the message that shyness may bring its own reward: that there is a creative power and amplitude in the experience of silence, reserve and solitude that shy writers know as the muteness, in the words of contributor Don McKay,
falling all around you, lavishly, pouring its heart out."
- Myrna Kostash
"The intimacy and honesty with which shyness, introversion, and attendant phobias, each different and debilitating, are revealed in
Shy demonstrates unexpected bravery.... Shy readers will find kindred spirits and inspiration in the airing of emotions and attitudes normally kept locked inside. Less shy readers may come to better understand the occasionally incapacitating dread that is often mistaken for aloofness."
- Joy Parks
