Award winning writer, Alex Poppe is coming out with her next award-winning book, Breakfast Wine, a personal, enticing memoir with all kinds of emotional adventured.
A chance encounter with an acclaimed journalist encourages Alex to accept a teaching position in northern Iraq. One crazy event after the next, from being thrown off the back of a truck to working alongside Sweden’s most notorious sex offenders, she discovers colored-glass pieces of information that fall together in a turn. Alex becomes educated in Kurdish culture and politics beyond the classroom and her experiences living in the Middle East before and during the COVID lockdown before her father’s passing. This is a story of pursuing an unconventional life and finding a way home.
“This is Poppe’s most enticing piece of work yet!” said Kevin Atticks, Apprentice House director.
This book is available on June 10th, 2025, on Amazon, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and wherever books are sold.
Description:
Dress-obsessed and directionless, 44-year-old Alex Poppe can’t get her life together. A business analyst, turned actor, turned teacher, she works a dead-end marketing job under a mammary gland-fixated man and still waits tables to make ends meet. A chance encounter with an acclaimed journalist encourages her to accept a teaching position in northern Iraq, which charms with a heart and a fist. Dining with a pistol-packing hitman, being thrown off the back of a truck during a humanitarian aid drop, and unknowingly working alongside one of Sweden’s most notorious sex offenders are colored-glass pieces of information that fall together in a turn, educating Alex in Kurdish culture and politics beyond what her students teach her in the classroom and what she experiences as a Western woman living in the Middle East. There are earthquakes and building fires and a small war juxtaposed against the senseless, drug-fueled death of a good friend and the bone chilling aftermath of the security police’s investigation. Alex navigates teaching online during the COVID lockdown with the help of WhatsApp before her father’s unexpected passing pushes her to return to the US. Blending memoir, personal essay, local topography, and culture, Breakfast Wine is a frank, human story of pursuing an unconventional life and finding a way home.
About the author:
Alex is a business analyst, turned actor, turned teacher/humanitarian aid volunteer, turned author. Living in places such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine shaped her understanding of privilege, hegemonic legacy, resilience, and the power of kindness. Her fiction illuminates fierce and funny women overcoming adversity in the aftermath of violence.
Three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly has praised Alex’s writing: “Care about these characters and you might help build a warmer world, a less predatory world. The stories seem to unfold effortlessly, but at a deeper level, Alex takes truths that everybody knows and makes them into truths no one can ignore.”
Booklist has called Alex’s writing “brisk, raw, and unflinching.”
Alex Poppe is the author of four works of literary fiction: Duende by Regal House Publishing (2022), Jinwar and Other Stories by Cune Press (2022), Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019), and Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017). Duende won the 2024 American Legacy Book Awards in the novella category, the 2023 International Book Awards in the novella category, and was a 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Awards finalist. Jinwar and Other Stories won the 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Award in the adult book category and was a 2022 International Book Awards finalist. In 2018, Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and commended for the Baker Prize among others. In 2021, Alex was an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where Breakfast Wine began.
About Apprentice House:
Apprentice House is the nation’s first and largest entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process.
As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Acquisitions and Development, Book Design and Production, and Book Marketing and Promotion.
Students in these courses serve as staff in Apprentice House’s acquisitions, design, and marketing departments, respectively.