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HAVE YOU LANDED?
MILITARY LOVE STORIES IN ESSAYS

COMING AUGUST 1, 2026

 

Emma's debut essay collection, HAVE YOU LANDED?, is forthcoming from Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

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HAVE YOU LANDED? explores modern life in one of our nation’s oldest institutions—the military. Interweaving interviews, research, and personal experience, HAVE YOU LANDED? alternates personal essays and immersive third-person "portraits" of fourteen real military spouses, partners, widows, and exes as they navigate everything they knew—and didn’t know—they signed up for.

Early praise for HAVE YOU LANDED?

“Equal parts tender and unblinking, HAVE YOU LANDED? is a generous and deeply immersive portrait of the most intimate proximities to military life. More than that, though, it’s a record of the profound power, complexity, and dignity inherent in an individual life, and of the constellation of ways we are—all of us—part of greater wholes.” —Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I’ve Taken My Body: Essays

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“Immersive, intimate, and reminiscent of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, HAVE YOU LANDED? has the quality of a song performed in moving harmony. Each voice is its own, but together they create a sound that is at once stoic, brave, and tender. For me, this collection did what the best books do: It reminded me that I am never alone.” —Simone Gorrindo, author of The Wives: A Memoir

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“Comery rewrites and broadens what we know of military living. . . . The quiet details of lives inside the imperative distance shine a light on what love looks like to servicepeople and civilians caring for country and home. There’s no hiding what’s hardest here: infertility, fraught faith, child rearing, relocation, death, devastation, war. Perhaps the figures depicted made time and space for inquiry because they grasped that someone in the future would desperately need a portrait of what they’d already survived, and despite the distance and difficulty, learn how they might thrive. To be a military partner is to know that the calling away can happen with no warning and all must endure despite this. The hope is that everyone caught in the fray comes out stronger, closer, whole. Have You Landed? is here to remind us all that ‘sometimes the leaving feels like falling apart, and sometimes it feels like falling in love'” —Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up

Our Best War Stories: Prize-winning Poetry & Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards, Vol. 2

Emma's poem, "Shipwreck on Padre Island," joins a powerhouse lineup of military-connected writers in this anthology published by MiddleWest Press in partnership with Line of Advance.

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Available in paperback, E-book, and with your subscription to Kindle Unlimited.

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