Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize as selected by Vievee Francis, Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen is a fascinating, glittering debut by an assured new voice. Inhabiting the life and work of Alexander McQueen, Wallace builds a fantastical world using both original language and excerpts drawn from interviews, supermodels, Shakespeare, Poe, and more. At turns fierce and vulnerable, precise and decadent, here is a collection that leaps from runway to fairytale to street with wild, brilliant grace.

VALERIE WALLACE is also the author of the chapbook The Dictators’ Guide to Good Housekeeping (2011). Margaret Atwood chose her work for the 2012 Atty Award, and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Award in Poetry. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Associate Director of Communications for the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago.

— Adam Morgan, The Chicago Review of Books