By Miranda Schmidt. Stillhouse Press, 2025.

Miranda Schmidt’s lyrical debut novel blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, reality and magic. A tale of queer love, new motherhood, and ecological interconnectedness, Leafskin interrogates how we create, and what we become, in a time of environmental devastation.

A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. When her artist ex-girlfriend, who has always had an uncanny connection to nature, re-enters her life, Jo struggles to navigate the transformations in her relationships and realities.

“In Leafskin, Miranda Schmidt’s remarkable first novel, short chapters as lyrical as prose poems weave and twine to probe what it means to make something grow in this time of climate destruction: a tree, a marriage, a poem, a painting, a friendship, a child.”
— Maya Sonenberg, author of Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters

“It’s into these intricate webs of relation that Leafskin settles like love, always shifting with the light, sometimes familiar, sometimes scary, sometimes unrecognizable, until we realize we’ve been living inside it all along.”
— Callum Angus, author of A Natural History of Transition

“Below the tree tops, the world is called the forest’s understory. In Leafskin, we find ourselves to be that understory.”
— Shawn Wong, author of American Knees

Miranda Schmidt is the author of the novel, Leafskin (Stillhouse Press 2025), and the forthcoming poetry chapbook The Cemetery Cure (dancing girl press 2026). Their hybrid writing moves between poetry and prose to circle folklore, ecology, and queer magic. Miranda’s work has appeared in Triquarterly, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, and more. With an MFA from the University of Washington and PhD from Bath Spa University, they have taught creative writing at Portland Community College, University of Washington, the Loft, and the Portland Book Festival. Miranda has attended workshops and residencies with Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Bread Loaf Environmental. Their newsletter and teaching project, Writing Toward Nature, explores methods for bringing the more-than-human more deeply into our writing craft. Miranda lives in Portland, Oregon.