About the Event

​Drawn from the author’s experience of homelessness and recovery, Courtney Denelle’s debut novel, It’s Not Nothing, is a collage of small moments, biting jokes, intrusive memories, and quiet epiphanies meant to reveal a greater truth: resilience never looks the way we expect it to look. 

Local, debut author Courtney Denelle, will appear at Ink Fish Books to meet readers and sign copies of It’s Not Nothing.

About the Book

It’s Not Nothing – published September 2022

For Rosemary Candwell her past has exploded into her present. Down- and-out and deteriorating, she drifts from anonymous beds and bars in Providence, to a homeless shelter hidden among the hedge-rowed avenues of Newport, and through the revolving door of service jobs and quick-fix psychiatric care, always grasping for hope, for a solution. She’s desperate to readjust back into a family and a world that has deemed her a crazy bitch living a choice they believe she could simply un-choose at any time.

She endures flashbacks and panic attacks, migraines and nightmares. She can’t sleep or she sleeps for days; she lashes out at anyone and everyone, especially herself. She abuses over-the-counter cold medicine and guzzles down anything caffeinated just to feel less alone. 

What if her family is right? What if she is truly broken beyond repai

Praise for It’s Not Nothing

"This is an extraordinary debut from a wildly talented author. Denelle's prose is a marvel of precision."

— Emily St. John Mandel, author of STATION ELEVEN and SEA OF TRANQUILITY

"IT'S NOT NOTHING is more than a book. It's an act of survival. Courtney Denelle writes like her life depends on it, and I believe her."

— Rachel Yoder, author of NIGHT BITCH

"Every generation or so a book like this comes around. It is a primal scream coming from the depths of the chasm."

— Charles Bock, NYT bestselling author of BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN and ALICE & OLIVER

"Denelle creates her own niche in the genre of women's psychological fiction (and) helps pave the way for mental health writers who crave a written structure that speaks to the reality of their experience."

— THE MILLIONS

About the Author

Courtney Denelle is a writer living in Providence. Winner of the 2021 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen award, she had received residencies from Hedgebrook and the Jentel Foundation, as well as a Hawthornden Fellowship. It’s Not Nothing is her first novel.