The sequel to Union Square, Miraculous Medal  was released by Apprentice House Press on May 1, 2020!

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Kirkus Review calls Miraculous Medal,  "a work that, at its best, invites richly deserved comparison to that of Ernest J. Gaines." 

Chris Harding Thornton reviewed Miraculous Medal for The Colorado Review here.

Steve Wingate interviewed me for the Dappled Things blog, "Deep Things," here. 

See my work at The Poetry Foundation

 Praise for Miraculous Medal:

"A dream of a book, light-filled and unflinching in its portrayal of  four intersecting lives in mid-century Baltimore. Like specters caught for a moment and held, Adrian Gibbons Koesters' characters are fleeting, luminous, and oh so true. They will haunt you long after you finish the book--and you will be glad for it." --Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread

"Like a brilliant miniaturist, Koesters captures the denizens of her native Baltimore in their broken moments and the tragedy of their private pain. The beauty of her work is that in such moments, they also understand the whole of life all at once." Steven Wingate, author of Of Fathers and Fire

"Adrian Koesters writes about childhood like an American Frank McCourt, taking us into a fully realized world...Miraculous Medal is a large-souled study of the space between the mysteries of faith and the perplexities of desire. A thoroughly absorbing read." --Brent Spencer, author of Rattlesnake Daddy

Praise for Union Square

"I loved this book. It is flat-out the best thing I’ve read in several years, and that includes a number of award-winning novels. I hardly know how to describe the experience of reading it. Koesters reminds me  of Virginia Woolf in her atmospheric power and ability to convey interiority, of Hemingway in her clarity and punch, and, once-in-a-lovely-while, of Cormac McCarthy in her syntactic drive and her swooping dives into metaphysical brooding. She gets everybody, from cocky-but-yearning teenage boys to psychically shattered, violent young men to snarky, guilty old pedophiles to heartbreakingly innocent young girls torn between desire and God. Really—if you have another novel you’ve started, put it aside and read this one. The other one will wait. This one will pin you to the wall.

-Kent Meyers, author of Twisted  Tree 

"Brilliant, disturbing, sad and maybe full of hope. [...] A novel not to be forgotten, for any of us."

-Judith Shadford

Praise for Three Days with the Long Moon
"The long moon that Adrian Koesters invokes in her powerful second collection pulls at every best-laid intention and barely-contained desire. The abiding theme here is control and the allure of losing it. Constrained  by a variety of forms, speaking through characters who wear the nun’s habit or the invisibility of middle age, these poems voice an insatiable hunger for the forbidden, the unavailable, the irretrievable. Koesters’ lines are tense and alive, as intimate as love letters. Three Days with  the Long Moon is a thrilling read."

—Kathleen Flenniken, author of Famous and Plume