Hello!
I am Gina Troisi, an author of memoir and fiction. I teach at the university level and in nontraditional settings, where I facilitate writing workshops for survivors of sexual assault and veterans. I also work one-on-one with clients who are working on their own writing projects, offering editorial services, guidance, and creative coaching. My award-winning nonfiction and fiction explore addiction, economic and class issues, childhood trauma, and the idea of found family. I believe that literature has the capacity to change and promote empathy in the world. Please check out my site if you’d like to work together or if you’d like to find out more about my writing.
My novel-in-stories, After the Rush, which is centered around one restaurant in a New Hampshire mill town, is forthcoming on March 30, 2027.
Praise for After the Rush:
“After the Rush is a restaurant novel that hits all the right notes, clearly written from a wise insider’s perspective, with a propulsive and deeply relatable story that makes it very difficult to put down.”
-Laurie Woolever, New York Times best-selling author of Care and Feeding
“This collection of linked stories is a bittersweet ode to those who work day-in, day-out in restaurants –cooking, serving, cleaning up, tending bar, all the while savoring the intensity and special camaraderie that is the work’s special gift. To evoke all this is an achievement in its own right, but Gina Troisi goes much further, into the longings, despairs, and kindnesses of the people who work at Timothy’s, who are giving to others something utterly essential that is, by definition, fleeting and who at the end of the long evening often find themselves contemplating the vastness that surrounds their lives, a vastness Troisi consistently and poetically elaborates and that gives these stories a perspective that is deeply real.”
– Baron Wormser, author of The Poetry Life: Ten Stories
“This observant and insightful novel-in-stories vividly depicts the lives of the employees of Timothy’s Bar and Grill. The characters search for meaning, try to escape their pasts, aim to fulfill dreams, and, above all, show up for each other every day both inside and outside the restaurant. After the Rush perfectly captures the rhythms of busy shifts at Timothy’s and shows how each character is so much more than just a bartender, a server, a dishwasher, or a chef. In these pages, the characters become fully-realized people whom readers will root for. Troisi’s empathetic and poignant book depicts how—in the luckiest circumstances—co-workers can become family.”
– Karen Lin-Greenberg, author of You Are Here
“Gina Troisi’s exquisite ensemble novel understands the particular loneliness of the service industry—the late nights, the chosen families, how a well-run line becomes salvation in a life of chaos. Timothy’s Bar and Grill is both drift and anchor for three young seekers elevating service into an art despite aching with private hungers. After the Rush is a simmering stew, rich and comforting, lingering long after the last word.”
-Leslie Pietrzyk, This Angel on My Chest, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize
“Set in and around a Bar and Grill in a no-account town, this novel-in-stories draws the reader into the grim, thorny, deeply connected lives of dishwashers, line cooks, bartenders, and servers whose work family is the only family they can count on. Gina Troisi writes about the precarity of life on the margins with the empathy of an insider. I found this book so moving.”
-Monica Wood, author of How to Read a Book, The One-in-a-Million Boy, and When We Were the Kennedys
“Read this beautiful book–which starts out as one thing, becomes another, and expands into what I can only call a heartsong. Gina Troisi is a master of every-day struggle, the way a place can become a family, and the many ways love finds its way in the dark.”
-Rebecca Barry, author of Later, At the Bar
“The recurrent characters in these stories (chapters) struggle with their families, stunted by abandonment and addiction, divorce and death. Underpinning their individual histories is a story as old as Telemachus’ quest; but these characters seek not just a father, but an entire family as they form and re-form new configurations that despite their misfortunes are defiantly optimistic. As Robby always said, ‘We are like family…Except better.’ The family that you choose. The one that chooses you.”
-Joan Connor, author of The Corner of East and Dreams
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