Boston, 1976. Fourteen-year-old Aiden Glencar wants his mother out of
the psychiatric hospital where doctors have called her schizophrenic.
He sees ghosts too, and he knows better.
“A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Kirkus Best Book 2019Readers’ Favorite Bronze MedalNotable Best Book 2019Wishing Shelf Finalist
Longer fiction about family, memory, and what a family keeps quiet.
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Give Them Unquiet Dreams (2019), the Kirkus-starred novel, is shown in A Closer Look above. View it on Amazon
Novel · 2016
Molly Bonamici
A literary coming-of-age novel set in Italian-American Boston, whose heroine takes her name and some of her nerve from Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Kirkus-reviewed, with five stars from Readers’ Favorite.
A novella of Molly’s grandmother’s Boston household, praised by the Missouri Review for its “well-written, complex characters” and “fantastic voice.” A Wishing Shelf Red Ribbon Winner that “literally jumps off the page.”
Stories about families, lovers, teachers, and aging women who carry the past like a second body—set in Boston kitchens, Catholic households, Florida streets, and seaside towns. The collection moves between dark humor, tenderness, and unease.
Aiden and his mother share second sight, a trait passed through generations of their family in Ireland. This collection gathers stories adapted from Give Them Unquiet Dreams, a Kirkus Best Book of 2019.
Stories moving between the supernatural and gritty realism—a boy who sees ghosts, a grandmother in search of a holy relic, a mother guarding a long-held secret—told in voices that shift from mystery to despair to unexpected joy.
Two collections: the early Poems and the newer Crossings.
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Poetry Collection · 2026
Crossings: Selected Poems
Twenty poems tracing the passages that shape a life—an immigrant ancestor’s ocean crossing, a father’s doorway question, a hospital room where presence becomes memory. Moving between Irish-Catholic Boston and Mulhern’s adopted Philadelphia, bound by water, faith, and unglamorous acts of love.
A collection of poetry by a writer shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and nominated for Best of the Net, with work published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.
James Mulhern has been published over 300 times in literary magazines, journals, and anthologies in the United States and around the world.
These books are edited and published by others; each gathers many writers, and my stories or poems appear among them. They range from “best of” volumes such as The Best of Fiction on the Web and Short Story America to the Scars Publications collections and issues of Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Better Than Starbucks, and Impspired. Open the list below to find each volume on Amazon.
See the volumes and covers
A selected list. Starred entries (★) identify “best of” collections.
Selected fiction and poetry has additionally appeared in the Missouri Review, the Galway Review, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Fragmented Voices, and many other journals.
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Tipton Poetry Journal #53
Summer 2022
Tipton Poetry Journal #44
Spring 2020
Chiron Review #121
Spring 2021
The Stray Branch, vol. 25, no. 28
Fall/Winter 2021
Better Than Starbucks—Premium
August 2022
Better Than Starbucks, vol. 5, no. 3
May 2020
Impspired—Volume Eleven
2023
Impspired—Volume Three
2020
Animal Wink—cc&d v326
October 2022
The Painting—Down in the Dirt v158
June 2018
The 2022 Poetry Review Date Book
2022
The Library’s Best, vol. 1
2009
Tipton Poetry Journal #53Summer 2022 quarterly issue of the Indiana-based poetry journal, gathering new poems alongside mine.
Tipton Poetry Journal #44Spring 2020 issue, published as the journal marked its eleventh year in print.
Chiron Review #121Spring 2021 issue of the long-running Kansas literary magazine known for its wide-ranging mix of poetry and prose.
The Stray Branch—#28 Vol 25Fall/Winter 2021 issue of the Appalachian-rooted poetry and short-fiction journal.
The 2022 Poetry Review Date BookA weekly date-book planner gathering select writings from 2021 issues of Down in the Dirt and cc&d magazines, one selection for every week of 2022.
Educational writing from thirty-five years in the classroom: guides to writing essays, textbooks on literary analysis, unit plans, and close readings of classic essays and speeches.
Essay Guides & Textbooks
How to Write It, How to Read It
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Nonfiction · Textbook · Paperback · 2018
Guide to Writing Essays
Step-by-step instructions and rubrics for writing a variety of essays—the Florida Standards Assessment ELA Essay, the New SAT Essay, the AP English Language and Composition Essays, the Evaluative Essay, the Narrative Essay/College Essay, and more—plus strategies for becoming a more proficient reader. Useful for both educators and students.
The same step-by-step Guide to Writing Essays, formatted for Kindle—covering the Florida Standards Assessment ELA Essay, the New SAT Essay, the AP English Language and Composition Essays, the Evaluative Essay, and the Narrative/College Essay, with rubrics and reading strategies included.
A teacher’s guide to the skill of analysis, with lesson plans, strategies, and sample analyses ranging from Native American literature through the present day—plus guidance for responding to prompts on the AP English Language and Composition Exam and notes on Mulhern’s own teaching philosophy and methodology.
Because analysis is a higher-level critical thinking skill, students often default to summary rather than explaining how a text works through the author’s rhetorical strategies. This Guide provides exemplars, questions, and strategies for teaching analysis—useful for any high school English class (especially AP English) and college English courses, inspired by selections from the Collections Textbook Series, Grade Nine (HMH Publishing).
AP English Language and Composition Exam: Guide for Essays
Specific, concrete directions for writing each of the three AP Lang essays—the Synthesis, the Analysis, and the Argumentative—plus a generic AP rubric that can be used to score any of the essays and a list of common mistakes to avoid.
32 pages · ISBN 978-1530053781
Paperback · Out of print, limited availability
By a Reader for The College Board’s AP English Exam
Passages from the books, each with a short note on how it works.
Kirkus Reviews · Starred
Give Them Unquiet Dreams · 28 July 2019
“A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.”
Of the prose itself the reviewer writes that it “is strong, delivering readers a sense of the child in Aiden’s voice and a thorough, descriptive view of the world around him,” and praises “a liberal use of quotes and sayings ranging from Bible verses to Thoreau and Yeats, grounding the various players’ cultural context.” The notice closes on the characters: “the rich characters who bring the novel to its greatest heights … give the sense that everything and everyone are connected across time, whether or not those ties are immediately perceived.”
“A gleefully and wonderfully odd protagonist eases readers into a bare-bones plot.”
The reviewer reads Molly as a character of philosophical curiosity rather than dysfunction: “Molly’s apathy toward death isn’t as strange as other characters think, more a curiosity than an obsession,” and her religious posture is described as “continually (and interestingly) [questioning] it, like why would God allow horrible things to happen.” Even when the prose “hits the occasional standstill,” the notice grants that Molly’s “distinctiveness is an appealing quality and often amusing,” citing her aside about maggots and word processors.
“James Mulhern did an excellent job of creating strong, colorful characters that lit up the page. There wasn’t a single clichéd or flat character among the plethora of people that Molly encountered.”
Phillips emphasizes the central figure herself—“a strong female character that wasn’t afraid to show her weakness or vulnerabilities”—and the larger thematic claim the novel makes through her: “Molly discovers that life is a giant mystery and no one is prepared for life’s twists and turns.” The review closes simply: “I found her refreshing and very likeable. A job well done.”
Red Ribbon Winner · Highly Recommended by The Wishing Shelf Book Awards.
Give Them Unquiet Dreams was named a Finalist in the 2020 Wishing Shelf Book Awards and received the jury’s Red Ribbon—the “highly recommended” distinction reserved by the panel of British readers and book groups who serve as its judges.
“Tales of grace and despair abound … the quieter scenes show the mind of a talented writer at work.”
The reviewer traces the early sequence of Molly-and-Nonna stories—the convent-gate robbery, the moral ambiguities—and notes that the collection is “influenced by writers such as Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, and Edgar Allan Poe.” The reviewer singles out the quieter passages: “the quieter scenes show the mind of a talented writer at work.”
