Hancock — North Wind Books in Hancock will feature Michigan author Helen Raica-Klotz for a reading and discussion of her new book. “Superior Stories,” is the winner of the 2025 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest in fiction. The event will take place at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 16, at 5:30 p.m. at North Wind Books, 437 Quincy Street in Hancock.

Superior Stories is a collection of six interconnected short stories set in the Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan’s northernmost region.

Award-winning novelist Bryan Gruley (“Bitterfrost,” “Starvation Lake,”) praised the book. “In her linked story collection, ‘Superior Stories,’ Helen Raica-Klotz takes readers deep into the physical and emotional lives of ordinary people struggling–and sometimes failing–to do right by themselves, their families, their friends, and their northern Michigan worlds. Raica-Klotz conjures evocative settings and richly layered up-north characters with language that is both concrete and elegiac, painting a hard yet enchanting landscape of tarpaper roofs, black ice, and hoar frost–a travelogue of human hope and grief, aspiration and desperation.”

About the Author

Helen Raica-Klotz earned her master’s degree in English from Central Michigan University and teaches composition at Saginaw Valley State University. She has also shared her love of writing in diverse settings including a regional prison, a homeless shelter, and an alternative high school–anywhere she can find people with stories worth telling.

Helen lives in northern Michigan with her husband, Steve, and their black lab, Atticus. When she’s not teaching–or dodging stacks of ungraded papers–she enjoys wandering the woods and soaking up the beauty of the north.