Strangers We Know By Heart by Annie Marhefka

Limited edition print copy from the 2025 Garden Party Chapbook Contest!
Shipping in Fall 2025!
cover art by Ronie Stephan

A tender meditation on motherhood, memory, and the quiet intimacy of everyday encounters. Marhefka’s epistolary stories speak directly to women—mothers, daughters, strangers—rendering their lives with aching clarity and reverence. This collection is a love letter to empathy, a testament to how even fleeting moments can shape us.

Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland; she is the winner of the 2024 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and her work was featured on The Slowdown Show. Annie is the Executive Director at Yellow Arrow Publishing, a Baltimore-based nonprofit empowering women-identifying writers. Annie is working on several nonfiction projects with support from the Maryland State Arts Council, Gullkistan Center for the Arts, and Tin House. She has a BA in creative writing from Washington College and an MBA, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. Follow Annie on Instagram @anniemarhefka and at anniemarhefka.com. When Annie is not writing, she is usually trying to find her way back to the water.

Praise for Strangers We Know By Heart:

By the end of Annie M’s collection, Strangers We Know By Heart, (and you will get to the end, I promise), you will feel seen, and you will see in a new way. Annie’s writing reminds us that in seeing others as truly as we can, we also see ourselves.

-Ann Quinn, Final Deployment and Poetry is Life

What a searing, poetic, and gutting examination of the challenges girls and women face. Each work is a dedication and moves like the best poems and essays move. And now, a dedication is in order to Annie Marhefka for this beautiful book.

-Jeannie Vanasco, A Silent Treatment