Stacia Tolman Books in Order

Stacia Tolman is a writer, freelance editor, and longtime teacher whose work moves between young adult fiction, essays, trivia books, and poetry. She has also worked as a columnist, and she tends to write about the kinds of things that stay with people, small towns, classrooms, chickens, family history, and the stories that simmer for years before they finally find a shape.

Tolman describes herself as coming from a long line of storytellers. She has written about childhood in the hills above New York's Mohawk Valley, with barns, gardens, smoke, and family weather all close at hand. New Hampshire is just as central to her life and work. It is where she taught, published, and made a home.

Teaching came before publishing.

Tolman spent many years as a high school English teacher at a private school in New Hampshire's Monadnock region, and later worked as a substitute teacher. By her own account, the seed of The Spaces Between Us came while she was surrounded by teenagers every day, listening to how they talked, noticing the strange rules of status and class, and watching friendships hold together or split apart under pressure.

That first novel, The Spaces Between Us, arrived in 2019. It follows Serena Velasco and Melody Grimshaw, two girls trying to get out of a struggling upstate New York town, and turns questions of class, loyalty, ambition, and escape into something personal and sharp. An early excerpt from the book helped Tolman win a New Hampshire State Council of the Arts grant for fiction.

The book began, in part, with memory.

Tolman has said that she realized late in the drafting process that the novel had been shaped by a junior high friendship she never quite forgot. That helps explain why the story feels so tuned to the push and pull between affection, embarrassment, hope, and damage. Readers who come to her fiction for plot usually stay for the emotional honesty underneath it, and for the way she lets class and place matter without turning them into lectures.

But Tolman isn't only a novelist. For Cluck's Sake! is a playful collection of chicken lore, trivia, quotes, and odd facts, written by someone who has been around chickens since childhood and has raised plenty of her own. The Ultimate Film Fanatic's Trivia Challenge shows another side of her range, turning movie, television, and streaming knowledge into a bookish game. Together, those books make her bibliography feel less like a straight line and more like a cabinet of lively interests.

She also writes shorter pieces and poems, and her work has appeared in the Keene Sentinel, the Massachusetts Review, and other publications. Contributor notes for literary magazines add a few more good details: she has written page-a-day calendars on subjects as different as Jane Austen, chickens, and baby boomers, and she has joked that after writing so many sonnets, lines still want to arrive in iambic pentameter. That sounds like a writer who enjoys both structure and play.

These days, she lives in Nelson, New Hampshire. Recent bios place her there with family, chickens, dogs, and a lot of household motion. That mix is a good way to understand her work. Whether she is following two girls who want out, gathering movie trivia, or celebrating the odd glory of backyard hens, she pays close attention to longing, routine, and the small details that make a voice feel real.