Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s first book, the novella Insect Dreams, was called “a stunning story, half historical fiction, half fever dream,” by the writer Jeff Vandermeer in Locus Online. Inspired by the life and work of the seventeenth century naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian and her two years spent in Surinam studying the insects there, Insect Dreams was initially published in the Small Beer Press anthology, Trampoline edited by Kelly Link. It was later selected by Peter Straub to be included in his anthology Poe’s Children and by Rain Mountain Press to be published as a stand-alone novella. The Absent, Rosalind’s 2016 novel, was described by the writer Mary Gordon as “an astonishing combination of dreaminess and precision.” Written against the backdrop of America’s 19th Century, The Absent is a poetic prose meditation on grief and loss, impermanence and what continues, and the weighing of the moments of a life against a lifetime. In her 2014 chapbook Kafka At Rudolf Steiner’s, she writes in the persona of Franz Kafka, combining the known and the unknown as she explores Kafka’s 1911 visit to the Rudolf Steiner and his highly idealized 1913 love affair during a stay at a sanatorium in Riva.

Rosalind’s short fiction and prose poems have been published in Conjunctions, First Intensity, LIT, Spinning Jenny, Washington Square, Drunken Boat, La Piccioletta Barca, Skidrow Penthouse, Negative Capability, Unlikely Stories Mark V, No Roses Review, Italian Americana Cultural and Historical Review, Quick Fiction, Literal Latte, Works (of fiction) In Progress, Reflections: Literary Journal of the United Nations Society of Writers, Phantasmagoria, eye-rhyme, and others. Her work has been anthologized in Poe’s Children, Trampoline, Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems.