Thank you for your interest in attending our event(s)! All of our events, unless otherwise noted, are held virtually via Zoom.

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To view past event recordings, check out our blog or YouTube channel! If you don't see what you're looking for, send a recording request to events@booksaremagic.net. 

We will be hosting storytimes every weekend via Youtube and Youtube Live at 11am. See our channel for videos!

Upcoming story times: on pause duing the holidays. These will resume in the new year! 

1/10 Yesenia Moises: Stella's Stellar Hair
1/31 Rio Cortez: The ABC's of Black History




 

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A stunning, complex narrative about the fractured legacy of a decades-old double murder in rural West Virginia -- and the writer determined to put the pieces back together.

 

In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders" though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. As time passed, the truth seemed to slip away, and the investigation itself inflicted its own traumas -- turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming the fears of violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries.

 

In The Third Rainbow Girl, Emma Copley Eisenberg uses the Rainbow Murders case as a starting point for a thought-provoking tale of an Appalachian community bound by the false stories that have been told about it. Weaving in experiences from her own years spent living in Pocahontas County, she follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, revealing how this mysterious murder has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and desires. Beautifully written and brutally honest, The Third Rainbow Girl presents a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America -- divided by gender and class, and haunted by its own violence.

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s work has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, VQR, Tin House, and The New Republic among other outlets, and has been recognized by the Millay Colony, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Longreads’ Best Crime Reporting. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-directs Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff.

Sarah Marshall grew up in Oregon and Hawaii and earned an MFA in fiction at Portland State University. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, BuzzFeed, and The Believer, among other publications, and she co-hosts You’re Wrong About, a podcast about misremembered history. A former future academic, she is now a traveling housesitter, babysitter, sled dog handler, and journalist.

 

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Upstairs, Downstairs meets Parasite: The acclaimed author of The Talented Ribkins deconstructs painful African American stereotypes and offers a fresh and searing critique on race, class, privilege, ambition, exploitation, and the seeds of rage in America in this intricately woven and masterfully executed historical novel, set in early twentieth century that centers around the black servants of a down-on-its heels upper-class white family.
 

For fifteen years August Sitwell has worked for the Barclays, a well-to-do white family who plucked him from an orphan asylum and gave him a job. The groundskeeper is part of the household’s all-black staff, along with “Miss Mamie,” the talented cook, pretty new maid Jennie Williams, and three young kitchen apprentices—the latest orphan boys Mr. Barclay has taken in to "civilize" boys like August.

 

But the Barclays fortunes have fallen, and their money is almost gone. When a prospective business associate proposes selling Miss Mamie’s delicious rib sauce to local markets under the brand name “The Rib King”—using a caricature of a wildly grinning August on the label—Mr. Barclay, desperate for cash, agrees. Yet neither Miss Mamie nor August will see a dime. Humiliated, August grows increasingly distraught, his anger building to a rage that explodes in shocking tragedy.

 

Ladee Hubbard is the author of The Talented Ribkins which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Times Literary Supplement, Copper Nickel and Callaloo. She is a recipient of a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Art Omi, the Sacatar Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida, she currently lives in New Orleans with her husband and three children. Photo credit: Zach Smith.

Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Slam magazine, the Huffington Post, Springhouse Journal, and other publications. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction and the 2020 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His first novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, was a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in Buffalo, New York. Photo credit: Jeremy Handrup. 

Join Kundiman's 2020 Mentorship Lab for a celebratory reading! The Kundiman Mentorship Lab supports nine emerging writers across the genres of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry. After six months of workshops, craft classes, and mentorship meetings, this six-month program culminates in a final reading with Books Are Magic. Join Mentorship Fellows Huiying B. Chan, Veasna Has, Promiti Islam, t. tran le, Christopher James Llego, Yasmin Adele Majeed, Ayesha Raees, Sarah Wang, and Wilson Wong as they read alongside their mentors: Hala Alyan, Gina Apostol, Ching-In Chen, and Mayukh Sen. 

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From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love.
 

Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.

 

Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I’m 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love—even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise.

 

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new book of poems from Norton is called Floaters. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and reissued by Northwestern. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. http://www.martinespada.net/

 

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. His debut full-length poetry collection Fractures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) was selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2020 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal and the International Book Award for Poetry, Gómez has been published in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. For more, please visit: CarlosLive.com

 

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Join Chase Berggrun, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Alysia Sawchyn for a reading and discussion of writing nearly a year into the pandemic.

 

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Prize published by BOA editions in 2018, as well as the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award for poetry, the 2019 Golden Poppy Award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, and the Bronze in the FOREWORD INDIE best book of the year. Cenzontle is also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the California Book Award, the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Northern California Book Award. Cenzontle was listed among one of NPR's and the New York Public Library top picks of 2018. His first chapbook, DULCE, won the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize published by Northwestern University press. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020.

 

Chase Berggrun is a trans woman poet and the author of R E D (Birds, LLC, 2018). Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, APR, jubilat, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

 

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a features editor for The Rumpus and currently lives in Northern Virginia. Her writing has appeared in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A Fish Growing Lungs is her first book.

 

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A scathingly funny, wildly erotic, and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex, and god from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today.

 

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

 

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

 

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.

 

Melissa Broder is the author of the novel The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. She has written for the New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York magazine’s The Cut. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, the Iowa Review, Tin House, and Guernica, and she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She lives in Los Angeles.