Echo Road Press

by Jeanine Boulay

Set against the backdrop of Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, What Keeps Us is a linked collection of short stories set across 160 years of New York City history. In post-Civil War Manhattan, a Black school principal keeps her community together while losing connection with her daughter. During the Great Depression, a young wife keeps a lie in order to find work, and through it, her own voice. As the pandemic claims the city, four seniors keep themselves safe, trading their newfound vitality for solitary survival. But it is Green-Wood Cemetery that keeps them all, along with its modern-day archivist, Rebecca. When Rebecca discovers that her own origin story may be hidden among the countless histories she guards, she learns how the work of remembering the forgotten becomes the work of understanding ourselves.

Like Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Elizabeth Stroud’s Olive Kitteridge, Jeanine Boulay’s What Keeps Us demonstrates how individual lives create the larger tapestry of shared humanity, exploring themes of resilience, chosen family, the power of place, and whose stories survive. Green-Wood Cemetery itself becomes a character—its Gothic arches, rolling hills, and weathered stones bearing witness to generations of women whose voices echo forward, asking what it means to be remembered and what it costs to be forgotten.

Forthcoming April 2026

JEANINE BOULAY writes fiction exploring connections across time and place. For twenty years she lived and taught in Brooklyn, where Green-Wood Cemetery became her sanctuary and the setting of her wedding. This connection inspired her linked story collection, What Keeps Us. Jeanine has been awarded several writing fellowships by The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center Institute for Teachers and the Academy for Teachers, where she studied under Karen Russell, Ian Frazier, Uwem Akpan, and others. An excerpt from Boulay’s forthcoming collection was shortlisted in the 2024 History Through Fiction short story contest and published as “Mrs. Price” in the anthology An End of Troubles (March 2025). Boulay now lives in Princeton, Massachusetts, with her husband, two energetic boys, and their pet axolotl. She is currently working on a novel set at Fernside, an historic building at the base of Wachusett Mountain that for a century served as a vacation home for women working in Boston’s factories, and is now a rehabilitation center for the ultra wealthy.

Jeanine Boulay’s What Keeps Us has been selected as the debut collection for Echo Road Press & will launch at the 2026 AWP Conference and Bookfair in Baltimore.