Currently, all of our March and April events are cancelled in store, but many will have virtual alternatives. Below are the upcoming virtual events, which we will update as each event is confirmed. Please view individiual listings for details:

• Andrea Bartz's Live conversation via Zoom 3/27
• Kawai Strong Washburn's Live Q&A via Instagram 4/2
• C Pam Zhang's Live conversation via Zoom 4/13

 

Books Are Magic is proud to host the (NYRB) Books Are Magic Book Club, a book club that discusses a different book by a female author in the New York Review Books catalog every other month.

 

This month we are discussing Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz. 

 

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.

 

Eve Babitz is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. Her novel Eve’s Hollywood is published by NYRB Classics.

 

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Believer. She is the author of Hollywood's Eve and lives in New York City with her husband and two small sons.

 

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Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in biological science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell’s heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan’s office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan’s elegance, success, and spiritual force.

 

Surrounded by Nell’s ex, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, and Joan’s buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges, and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.

 

Meanwhile, Nell slowly fills her empty apartment with poisonous plants to study, and she begins to keep a series of notebooks, all dedicated to Joan. She logs her research and how she spends her days, but the notebooks ultimately become a painstaking map of love. In a dazzling and unforgettable voice, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight has written a spellbinding novel of emotional and intellectual intensity.

 

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novel and screenplay The Sunlit Night, and a bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems, Lofoten. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker online, among others. She is a graduate of Yale and the NYU MFA program, and has received a Wallant Award for Jewish Literature. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in New Hampshire.

Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

 

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A groundbreaking debut novel that folds the legends of Hawaiian gods into an engrossing family saga; a story of exile and the pursuit of salvation.

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawai‘i, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears the worst. But Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story the stuff of legends.

 

Sharks in the Time of Saviors follows Noa’s family as they struggle amid the collapsing sugarcane industry. They hail his rescue as a sign of the favor of ancient Hawaiian gods—a belief that appears reinforced by Noa’s puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor drives the family apart: Noa, now working as a paramedic in gritty Oregon neighborhoods, attempts to fathom his expanding abilities; farther north, in Washington, his older brother Dean, becoming obsessed with wealth and fame, hurtles into the world of elite college athletics; while in California, risk-addicted younger sister Kaui navigates unforgiving academic and wilderness landscapes to forge her independence from the family’s legacy.

 

When supernatural events revisit the Flores household in Hawai‘i—this time with tragic consequences—everyone must reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

 

Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.  

 

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Kilmer Watts makes his living teaching piano lessons, but when automatic pianos arrive in town, he realizes he’s out of a job. He spots a “Help Wanted” sign at the poem factory and decides to investigate — he’s always been curious about how poems are made.

 

The foreman explains that machines and assembly lines are used for poetry these days. So Kilmer learns how to operate the “meter meter” and empty the “cliché bins.” He assembles a poem by picking out a rhyme scheme, sprinkling in some similes and adding alliteration.

 

But one day the machines malfunction, and there is a dramatic explosion at the poem factory. How will poetry ever survive?

 

Kyle Lukoff’s funny story, rich in wordplay, is complemented by Mark Hoffmann’s lively, quirky art. The backmatter includes definitions of poetic feet, types of poems (with illustrated examples) and a glossary of other terms. An author’s note explains the inspiration for the story.

 

Kyle Lukoff has worked at the intersection of books and people for more than half his life, first as a bookseller and later as a school librarian, reviewer, awards juror and contributor to professional publications. His first picture book, A Storytelling of Ravens, illustrated by Natalie Nelson, received two starred reviews and his second, When Aidan Became a Brother was described as "joyful and affirming" in a Kirkus starred review and has received three other starred reviews. A confirmed bachelor, Kyle lives in a Brooklyn apartment filled with books.

 

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It's a busy morning in the city. Yotam and his mom stop in at their local café on the way to school, tying their dog's leash to an outside chair as usual. But today isn't usual. Bailey the dog gets startled by something and is suddenly dashing down Henry Street, freed of her leash and frantic. Before Yotam can catch up with her, she has disappeared. And that's when lots of neighbors get involved, joining in the search for the missing dog and offering all kinds of support and love.

 

This bright, energetic book is inspired by a true Brooklyn story of strangers rallying to help their neighbor. It's a rousing, feel-good animal adventure for the picture book audience, and a portrait of community at its best and kindest.

 

Amy Sohn’s Brooklyn novels, Prospect Park West and Motherland, were international successes and made her an icon of the New Brooklyn. She is also the author of The Actress, Run Catch Kiss, and My Old Man. A New York City native, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and their dog Luna.

 

Orna Le Pape is a psychotherapist in private practice. She lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with her sons, and with Bailey.

 

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Before Quinn Ryan was in love with Jamie Rudawski, she loved Jamie Rudawski, who was her best friend. But when Jamie dumps Quinn a month before their senior year, Quinn is suddenly girlfriend-less and best friend-less.

 

Enter a new crush: Ruby Ocampo, the gorgeous and rich lead singer of the popular band Sweets, who’s just broken up with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Quinn’s always only wanted to be with Jamie, but if Jamie no longer wants to be with her, why can’t Quinn go all in on Ruby? But the closer Quinn grows to Ruby, the more she misses Jamie, and the more (she thinks) Jamie misses her. Who says your first love can’t be your second love, too?

 

Katie Heaney is the author of the memoirs Never Have I Ever and Would You Rather?, and the novels Dear Emma and Public Relations. She is a senior health writer at the Cut, and you can find her on Twitter at @KTHeaney.

Gabrielle Korn is the Director of Fashion and Culture at Refinery29. She has worked in digital media since 2011, after graduating from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a BA in queer and feminist theory, and writing. She served as Editor in Chief of Nylon Media from 2017 to 2019, and rebranded the publication to reflect progressive values, prioritizing LGBTQ inclusivity, racial diversity, and body positivity. Her debut memoir, Everybody (ELSE) Is Perfect, comes out June 2020 from Atria. She lives in Brooklyn with her fiancé and two rescue dogs.

 

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Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North America. He was known as the Dark One, and his weapon of choice—catastrophic events known as Drains—leveled cities and claimed thousands of lives. Chosen Ones, as the teens were known, gave everything they had to defeat him.

After the Dark One fell, the world went back to normal . . . for everyone but them. After all, what do you do when you’re the most famous people on Earth, your only education was in magical destruction, and your purpose in life is now fulfilled?

Of the five, Sloane has had the hardest time adjusting. Everyone else blames the PTSD—and her huge attitude problem—but really, she’s hiding secrets from them . . . secrets that keep her tied to the past and alienate her from the only four people in the world who understand her.

On the tenth anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat, something unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. When the others gather for the funeral, they discover the Dark One’s ultimate goal was much bigger than they, the government, or even prophecy could have foretold—bigger than the world itself.

And this time, fighting back might take more than Sloane has to give.

VERONICA ROTH is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide), and many short stories and essays.

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Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony—and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

 

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

 

Robert Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books and one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O magazine,and Men's Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

 

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

 

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The conclusion of the hilarious and heartwarming graphic novel duology about Bitty, the figure skater turned collegiate hockey player who finds the love of his life and friendships of a lifetime during his time on the Samwell University hockey team.

 

Bitty is heading to junior year of college and though he has overcome his fear of getting "checked" on the ice, he and Jack now face new challanges. They must nagivate their new relationship while being apart and also decide how they want to reveal their relationship to those around them. Not only that, but Jack and the Falconers are now a big part of the NHL—and Bitty's life! It's a hockey season filled with victories and losses.

 

Ngozi Ukazu is the creator of Check, Please!, a massively popular online graphic novel. She graduated from Yale University in 2013 and received a master's in sequential art in 2015 from the Savannah College of Art and Design. While she used her intensive knowledge of ice hockey to launch Check, Please! in 2013, Ngozi has a deep interest in sports that ranges from half-marathon training to basketball documentaries. Ngozi also cites '90s sitcoms as a major influence in the quirky, found-family feel of Check, Please!  

Tiffany Babb is an essayist, comics critic, and poet. She reads and then she writes and then she talks about what she has read and written. Find her comics criticism in PanelxPanel Magazine, Women Write About Comics, Shelfdust, and the MNT. Find her on twitter @explodingarrow or subscribe to her monthly essay about art at www.tiffanybabb.com.

 

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In this extraordinarily intimate portrait of her mother—and herself—Fanny Singer, daughter of food icon and activist Alice Waters, chronicles a unique world of food, wine, and travel; a world filled with colorful characters, mouth-watering traditions, and sumptuous feasts. Across dozens of vignettes with accompanying recipes, she shares the story of her own culinary coming of age and reveals a side of her legendary mother that has never been seen before. A charming, smart translation of Alice Waters’s ideals and attitudes about food for a new generation, Always Home is a loving, often funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely written look at a life defined in so many ways by food, as well as the bond between mother and daughter.

 

Fanny Singer is a writer, editor, and co-founder of the design brand, Permanent Collection. In 2013, she received a Ph.D. on the subject of the British pop artist Richard Hamilton's late work from the University of Cambridge. In 2015, she and her mother, Alice Waters, published My Pantry, which she also illustrated. Having spent more than a decade living in the United Kingdom, Fanny recently moved back to her native California. Based in San Francisco, she travels widely, contributing art reviews and culture writing to a number of publications including Frieze, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Apartamento, T Magazine, and Art Papers, among others.

 

Tamar Adler is a contributing editor to Vogue. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the NewYorker.com, and other publications. Adler has won a James Beard Award and an IACP Award, and is the author of An Everlasting Meal and Something Old, Something New. She lives in Hudson, New York.
 

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Flèche (the French word for ‘arrow’) is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan’s young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable (‘flesh’) and weaponised (‘flèche’), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one’s need for safety alongside the desire to shed one’s protective armour in order to fully embrace the world. Central to the collection is the figure of the poet’s mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan’s childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.

 

Mary Jean Chan is a London-based poet, lecturer and editor from Hong Kong. Her debut collection, Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019), was the winner of the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry, and is currently longlisted for the 2020 International Dylan Thomas Prize. Chan has twice been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and was the recipient of a 2019 Eric Gregory Award and the 2018 Poetry Society Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Chan currently lectures in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears or is forthcoming in many publications, including Poetry, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2019). He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. With Sam Herschel Wein, he co-runs the journal Underblong. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

 

Arhm Choi Wild is a queer, Korean-American poet who grew up in the slam community of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and went on to perform across the country, including at Brave New Voices, the New York City Poetry Festival, and Asheville Wordfest. Arhm is a Kundiman fellow with an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019. Their work has been anthologized in Daring to Repair by Wising Up Press and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures, and appears in Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Split this Rock, Foglifter, Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and other publications. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and as a Diversity Coordinator at a school in New York City. 

 

R.A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. New writing appears in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and international publications such as The Poetry Review and Prac Crit. His honors include the Ninth Letter Literary Award, commendations from the Forward Prizes, and fellowships from Kundiman and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn. 

 

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It seems that wherever Aria goes, someone wants to touch her hair. In the street, strangers reach for her fluffy curls; and even under the sea, in the jungle, and in space, she's chased by a mermaid, monkeys, and poked by aliens...until, finally, Aria has had enough!

 

Author-illustrator Sharee Miller takes the tradition of appreciation of black hair to a new, fresh, level as she doesn't seek to convince or remind young readers that their curls are beautiful--she simply acknowledges black beauty while telling a fun, imaginative story.

 

Sharee Miller has a BFA in communication design from Pratt Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, where she enjoys spending time with her two cats and illustrating fun stories. Sharee is the author and illustrator of Princess Hair. She invites you to visit her website at www.shareemiller.com and her Instagram @coilyandcute.

 

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Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

 

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.

 

C Pam Zhang's debut novel, HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD, is forthcoming in April 2020 from Riverhead Books in the US and Virago Press in the UK. It is an Indies Introduce pick. Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She currently lives in San Francisco and also online.

Alice Sola Kim, a left-handed anchor baby currently residing in New York, is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Tin House, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, Lenny, BuzzFeed Books, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

 

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Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck. Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands—a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver—a true comedy of errors ensues. As history’s least conventional courtship progresses into talk of marriage, Iseult’s mother becomes increasingly volatile and uncontrollable, and Iseult is forced to resort to extreme, often violent, measures to keep her in check.

 

As the day of the wedding nears, Iseult must decide whether (and how) to set the course of her life, with increasing interference from both her mother and father, tipping her ever closer to madness, and to an inevitable, devastating final act.

 

Molly Pohlig graduated from James Madison University with a BA in English, and from University College Dublin with an MA in Film Studies. She is the associate editor for Vogue Knitting magazine, and has written humorous pieces and personal essays for Slate, The Toast, Racked, and The Hairpin. Originally from Virginia, she currently lives in Brooklyn.  

Jess Zimmerman is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. Her essay collection on mythological monsters is forthcoming from Beacon Press. 

 

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Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for.

 

Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

 

Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among others. She has been awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel.

 

T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

 

Marisa Siegel lives, writes, and edits near NYC. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her poems have appeared in Handsome, Zaum, (T)here, and elsewhere. Her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the anthology Burn It Down (Seal Press. 2019) and her debut poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Burrow Press in 2021. She is Editor-in-Chief and owner of The Rumpus. Follow her on Twitter @marisasaystweet.

 

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Please join us for a Qmunnity in Publishing panel, a series curated and presented by inQluded. The conversation will center on how QTBIPOC representation and activism are redefining the publishing landscape, featuring authors JP Brammer, Krutika Mallikarjuna, Leah Johnson, and Matt Ortile as moderator. 

 

inQluded is a platform and community for/by queer, trans, intersex, Black, Indigenous, people of color (ages 13-30). Their space is safe for aro/ace and nonbinary folx. Everyone on their team IDs as a QTBIPOC as well as all of our contributors. They are committed to nurturing and amplifying the voices of emerging QTBIPOC publishing professionals, writers, and artists by providing resources and various programming on and offline.

 

John Paul Brammer is a writer, speaker, and activist based in New York City. His work has been published in The Guardian, Slate, BuzzFeed, NBC, and many other outlets. His work blends the deeply personal with the political. Samples of his writing, including essays, memoirs, and features can be found here on his website. ¡Hola Papi! is coming out from Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint in 2021.

 

Krutika Mallikarjuna is an entertainment journalist who writes at the intersection of pop culture and identity. She's currently the features editor at TV Guide. You can also find her bylines at BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Shondaland, Inverse, as well as in the anthology collection The Good Immigrant USA. Her best writing however, is undoubtedly found in drunk live-tweet form @krutika.

 

Leah Johnson is a writer, editor, and eternal Midwesterner currently moonlighting as a New Yorker. She is a graduate of Indiana University and Sarah Lawrence College, where she received her MFA in fiction writing and currently teaches in the undergraduate writing program. Her YA novels You Should See Me in a Crown (June 2020) and Rise to the Sun (2021) are forthcoming from Scholastic.

 

Matt Ortile (or-TEE-lay) is the author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name (Bold Type Books, June 2020) and the managing editor of Catapult magazine. Previously, he was the global publishing lead for BuzzFeed International and the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. He is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has written for BuzzFeed Reader, Into, Self, Out, and Details, among others. He graduated from Vassar College, which means he now lives in Brooklyn.

 

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San Cristóbal was an unremarkable city—small, newly prosperous, contained by rain forest and river. But then the children arrived.

 

No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city’s own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos.

 

Narrated by the social worker who led the hunt, A Luminous Republic is a suspenseful, anguished fable that “could be read as Lord of the Flies seen from the other side, but that would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world” (Juan Gabriel Vásquez).

 

Andrés Barba is the award-winning author of numerous books, including Such Small Hands and The Right Intention. He was one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish novelists and received the Premio Herralde for Luminous Republic, which will be translated into twenty languages.

 

Álvaro Enrigue was a Cullman Center Fellow and a Fellow at the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies. He has taught at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Columbia University. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The White Review, n+1, London Review of Books, El País, among others. Sudden Death—his first novel translated into English—was awarded the prestigious Herralde Prize in Spain, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction, and has been translated into many languages. Enrigue was born in Mexico and lives in New York City.

 

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When Herb, a magician’s rabbit, gets sick and tired of being pulled out of Abracadabra Al’s hat, he quits and sets out to find a new job. A funny and irreverent picture book about standing up for yourself, complete with bright collage art and a healthy dose of friendship.

 

What’s in a name? In the companion to I Do Not Like Al’s Hat, Sophie and Herb send away for an elephant to be their new friend. When he arrives in the mail without a name, it’s up to them to find the perfect moniker for their giant pal. This funny picture book about friendship, identity, and why we have names is illustrated with bright collage art and a healthy dose of humor.

 

Erin McGill is a life long New Yorker. She received a BFA in illustration from Pratt Institute, where she discovered her love of patterns and textures. Erin is the author/illustrator of I DO NOT LIKE AL’S HAT, I DO NOT LIKE THAT NAME and MATCHY MATCHY. She currently lives in Manhattan with her husband. 

 

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Nina once bought into the idea that her fancy liberal arts degree would lead to a fulfilling career. When that dream crashed, she turned to stealing from rich kids in L.A. alongside her wily Irish boyfriend, Lachlan. Nina learned from the best: Her mother was the original con artist, hustling to give her daughter a decent childhood despite their wayward life. But when her mom gets sick, Nina puts everything on the line to help her, even if it means running her most audacious, dangerous scam yet.

 

Vanessa is a privileged young heiress who wanted to make her mark in the world. Instead she becomes an Instagram influencer—traveling the globe, receiving free clothes and products, and posing for pictures in exotic locales. But behind the covetable façade is a life marked by tragedy. After a broken engagement, Vanessa retreats to her family’s sprawling mountain estate, Stonehaven: a mansion of dark secrets not just from Vanessa’s past, but from that of a lost and troubled girl named Nina.

 

Nina’s, Vanessa’s, and Lachlan’s paths collide here, on the cold shores of Lake Tahoe, where their intertwined lives give way to a winter of aspiration and desire, duplicity and revenge. 

 

Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and This Is Where We Live. An essayist and journalist, she has written for Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and numerous other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children.

 

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In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power--the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

 

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

 

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

 

Madeline Miller grew up in New York City and Philadelphia. She attended Brown University, where she earned her BA and MA in Classics. She has taught and tutored Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for the past twenty years. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms.The Song of Achilles, her first novel, was awarded the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. It has been translated into over twenty-five languages including Dutch, Mandarin, Japanese, Turkish, Arabic and Greek. Madeline was also shortlisted for the 2012 Stonewall Writer of the Year. Her second novel, Circe, was an instant number 1 New York Times bestseller, and won the 2018 Elle Big Book Award. Madeline's essays have appeared in a number of publications including the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Telegraph, Lapham's Quarterly and NPR.org. She currently lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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It’s the end of summer when we meet Sarah, the end of summer and the middle of her life, the middle of her career (she hopes it’s not the end), the middle of her marriage (recently repaired). And despite the years that have passed since she last saw her daughter, she is still very much in the middle of figuring out what happened to Leda, what role she played, and how she will let that loss affect the rest of her life.

 

Enter a mysterious stranger on a train, an older man taking the subway to Brooklyn who sees right into her. Then a mugging, her phone stolen, and with it any last connection to Leda. And then an invitation, friends from the past and a weekend in the country with their new, unexpected baby.

 

Over the course of three hot September days, the two couples try to reconnect. Events that have been set in motion, circumstances and feelings kept hidden, rise to the surface, forcing each to ask not just how they ended up where they are, but how they ended up who they are.

 

Joanna Hershon is the author of four novels: Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride, and A Dual Inheritance. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, and two literary anthologies, Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot. She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, their twin sons, and their daughter.

 

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out earlier this year. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn. 

 

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In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.

 

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer & educator. Interim Executive Director of Urban Word NYC & Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby & Black Girl Magic (Macmillan), Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books) & Dear Twitter (Penmanship Books). She is also the founder of Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diversity literature campaign) & as an Arts for Justice grantee, is completing her first book of essays on mass incarceration's, investigating its impact on women and children. She resides in Brooklyn, NY. Photo credit: Mark Poucher

 

Cathy Linh Che is a poet, teacher, and arts administrator living in Queens. She is the author of Split, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is working on a manuscript called FADE IN about her parents' experiences as refugees playing extras in Apocalypse Now. Photo credit: Jess X. Snow

 

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, Cave Canem, and is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University. Photo credit: Sean D. Henry-Smith

 

Nabila Lovelace is a born & raised Queens native, as well as a first generation American. Her parents hail from Trinidad & Tobago & Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is forthcoming from YesYes Books. Currently you can find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa. Photo credit: A. H. Jerriod Avant

 

Monica Sok is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. She is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbook Year Zero, winner of a 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has been recognized with a "Discovery" Poetry Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, NEA, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She lives in Oakland, California, where she teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youths at Banteay Srei and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants. Photo credit: Andria Lo

 

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Regardless of the medium, July’s daring, urgent, and idiosyncratic voice finds unexpectedly accessible forms that reflect the poignancy and strangeness of the human plight. In film, fiction, performance, public art, commerce, and even a smartphone app, July deftly explores themes of inclusivity, desire, fear, and fantasy. This chronological survey spans the artist’s entire career to date, including her early plays and fanzines, participatory works, and personal projects which illuminate the multidimensionality and timeliness of her work.

 

Miranda July is brought to life in an introductory interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson and candid recollections by friends, collaborators, curators, assistants, and audience members: Carrie Brownstein, David Byrne, Spike Jonze, Sheila Heti, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and July herself. This revealing, insightful commentary provides an intimate perspective on the artist’s ever-evolving process. July may be impossible to categorize, but the enduring importance of her work and her status as an essential cultural icon is irrefutable.

 

MIRANDA JULY is one of the most impressive cross-disciplinary artists of her generation. A filmmaker, artist, and writer, her daring, urgent, and inimitable voice persists in reflecting the poignancy and strangeness of the human plight.

 

She wrote, directed and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know — winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and recently added to the Criterion Collection. Her latest film, Kajillionaire, which she wrote and directed, world premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

July is an award-winning author. Her most recent book published by Prestel April 2020, Miranda July, has re-imagined the art monograph as an oral history on her career to date. July’s collection of stories, No One Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. It Chooses You was her first book of non-fiction, which was followed by her debut novel, The First Bad Man. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s and The New Yorker.

 

July’s participatory art works include “Eleven Heavy Things” (a sculpture garden created for the 2009 Venice Biennale); “New Society” (a performance); “Somebody” (a messaging app created with Miu Miu), and an interfaith charity shop in Selfridges department store in London, presented by Artangel.

 

Raised in Berkeley, California, July lives in Los Angeles.

 

HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of the New York Times Notable book, The Folded Clock: A Diary, the bestselling Women in Clothes (with Shelia Heti and Leanne Shapton), and four novels, including The Vanishers. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and New York Magazine. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

 

May Attaway, a dry, witty, and unapologetic narrator, loves literature and her work as a botanist for the university in her hometown, where she lives with her elderly father and holds herself and everyone around her to exactingly high standards. More at home with plants than people, May begins to suspect she isn’t very good at friendship, and she wonders if it’s possible to improve with practice. Granted some leave from her job, May sets out on a journey to spend time with four long-neglected friends.

 

Smart, funny, and full of compassion, Rules for Visiting is a singular look at the way friends become a substitute family, or not. While May travels in search of friendship in the digital age, she begins to confront the pain of her past in real time.

 

Jessica Francis Kane is the author of This Close, The Report, and Bending Heaven. This Close was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and The Report was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta.

 

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Indigo, the newest collection by Ellen Bass, merges elegy and praise poem in an exploration of life’s complexities. Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife’s return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own “succulent skin,” the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents’ lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.

 

Poet and educator Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poetry, Like a Beggar, was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award. Previous books include The Human Line and Mules of Love, which won The Lambda Literary Award. Bass has also written works of nonfiction, including, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. The New Yorker has published ten of Bass’s poems throughout the years, and two have been chosen for The New Yorker podcast. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Ben Purkert is the author of For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books, 2018). His poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. An editor at Guernica, he is the founder of Back Draft, an interview series focused on poetry and revision. He lives in Jersey City and teaches at Rutgers.

 

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Red Ink is a quarterly series curated and hosted by Michele Filgate, and co-sponsored by Literary Hub. Red Ink makes one think of vitality, blood, the monthly cycle, correcting history, and making a mark on the world. This dynamic series focuses on women writers, past and present. The next discussion, “Defiance,” will feature Afia Atakora (Conjure Women), Laura Bogart (Don’t You Know I Love You), Rachel Vorona Cote (Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Bind Women Today), and Amy Jo Burns (Shiner).

 

Afia Atakora was born in the United Kingdom and raised in New Jersey, where she now lives. She graduated from New York University and has an MFA from Columbia University, where she was the recipient of the De Alba Fellowship. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers.

 

Laura Bogart is a featured writer at The Week and a contributing editor to DAME magazine. She was a featured writer at Salon, where her essays about body image, dating, politics, and violence went viral - her pieces were regularly recognized as Editor's Choice. She has written about pop culture, often through the perspective of gender, for The Atlantic, The Guardian, SPIN, The Rumpus, Vulture, Roger Ebert, The AV Club, and Refinery 29. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the Grace Paley Fellowship from the Juniper Institute at UMass Amherst. Laura has been interviewed about body size and pop culture for NPR outlets.

 

Rachel Vorona Cote is the author of TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. She also publishes frequently in such outlets as the New Republic, Longreads, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, and Catapult. In a past life, she was ABD at the University of Maryland, where she studied Victorian literature. She and her husband live in Takoma Park, MD, just outside of Washington, D.C. They have a very melodramatic and excellent cat. 

 

Michele Filgate’s work has appeared in Longreads; The Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; The Boston Globe; The Paris Review Daily; Tin House; Gulf Coast; O, The Oprah Magazine; BuzzFeed; Refinery29; and many other publications. Currently, she is an MFA student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. She’s a contributing editor at Literary Hub and teaches at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult. What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is her first book.

 

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and Shiner, a novel. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Ploughshares, Gay Magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.

 

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Meet Kimberly, a regular suburban housewife and mother, whose discovery later in life that she was born intersex fuelled her to become an international human rights defender and globally-recognised activist.

 

Charting her intersex discovery and her journey to self-acceptance, this book movingly portrays how being intersex impacted Kimberly's personal and family life, as well as her career. From uncovering a secret that was intentionally kept from her, to coming out to her family and friends and fighting for intersex rights, her candid and empowering story helps breakdown barriers and misconceptions of intersex people and brings to light the trauma and harmful impact medical intervention continues to have on the intersex community.

 

Written from a non-queer perspective, and filled with much-needed, straightforward information and advice about what it means to be intersex, this is a vital and timely resource for intersex people and their families, as well as the general reader.

 

Kimberly Zieselman, JD is an intersex woman, lawyer and the Executive Director of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, the world’s largest intersex advocacy organization. Kimberly has more than 25 years of experience in advocacy and nonprofit advocacy including Director of Government Relations for Boston Children’s Hospital. Kimberly served on the board of the AIS-DSD Support Group, the largest intersex support group in the US and participated in the UN Office of the High Commissioner & Expert Intersex Consultation in 2015. She is also an official signatory to the updated version of the Yogyakarta Principles on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity – a milestone international human rights guidance document for LGBTQIA+. Kimberly regularly consults on intersex media projects and has been quoted and/or published in outlets including, USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, and The Advocate.

 

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A new addition to the beloved and bestselling Baby Loves series! This cute and clever introduction to political science is accurate and simple enough for baby, and ready to teach Baby what makes a great democracy.

 

Baby learns what it means to participate in a democracy where everyone has a voice in electing our leaders. There are many ways for all of us, including the youngest children, to participate—such as making signs and sending postcards, campaigning, attending rallies, and of course getting out the vote!

 

Ruth Spiro is the author of the best-selling Baby Loves Science series, which has been praised for introducing "big science to little minds with the skill of a neurosurgeon" (Matthew Winner, All the Wonders podcast). Ruth also wrote the picture book Made by Maxine. She speaks regularly at STEM and early-childhood conferences across the country.

 

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This talk will be broadcast live via Zoom.

Former U.S. Army captain Matt Gallagher is the author of the novel Youngblood, published in February 2016 by Atria/Simon & Schuster and a finalist for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review Daily and Wired, among other places. He's also the author of the Iraq memoir Kaboom and coeditor of, and contributor to, the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.

 

In 2015, Gallagher was featured in Vanity Fair as one of the voices of a new generation of American war literature. In January 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren read Matt's Boston Globe op-ed "Trump Rejects the Muslims Who Helped Us" on the U.S. Senate Floor. Among other media, he's appeared on CBS News Sunday Morning and NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, and was interviewed at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan by retired general David H. Petraeus.

 

A graduate of Wake Forest University, Matt Gallagher also holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn and works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.
 

Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and was once given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. Formerly of The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Books, and BuzzFeed News’ Twitter morning show #AMtoDM, Isaac appears frequently on The Today Show and is the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes). How to Be a Pirate, illustrated by Brigette Barrager, is his first picture book.

 

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When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence?

 

Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.

 

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of three other novels The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, this very bookstore. 

 

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When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

 

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of several books of poetry including Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and more. https://maggiesmithpoet.com/ www.oneisgnalpublishers.com

 

Rebecca Soffer is cofounder of Modern Loss and coauthor of the book "Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome," which The Cut named a best book on loss for a younger generation. She has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, led retreats at Kripalu and spoken nationally on loss and resilience at Chicago Ideas Week, HBO, and Amazon. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, Marie Claire, and The Wing's magazine No Man's Land. Rebecca is a former producer for The Colbert Report and a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumna.

 

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As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers.

 

Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything.

 

As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in acknowledging how what we couldn’t say for so long is a way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves.

 

Michele Filgate’s work has appeared in Longreads; The Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; The Boston Globe; The Paris Review Daily; Tin House; Gulf Coast; O, The Oprah Magazine; BuzzFeed; Refinery29; and many other publications. Currently, she is an MFA student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. She’s a contributing editor at Literary Hub and teaches at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult. WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON’T TALK ABOUT is her first book.

 

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Join us for a storytime reading in partnership with PEN America, as a part of the Next Generation Now stream for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. 
 

In his debut children’s book Fry Bread, journalist, lawyer and professor Kevin Noble Maillard invites readers across cultures to indulge in the tradition of coming together through food. Fry bread is a Native American dish made with cornmeal and yeast in a pan of sizzling oil. Maillard describes its delicious power to unite families, tribes and histories across cultural borders. A book signing of the award-winning work will follow a reading for this weekend story hour.

 

Kevin Noble Maillard is the debut author of Fry Bread, published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan. He is a regular writer and former contributing editor to the New York Times, with additional writings in The Atlantic, Essence, and The Week. He has provided on-air commentary for MSNBC, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera. He is a tenured professor of law at Syracuse University. A graduate of Duke University and Penn Law School, he also earned a PhD in Political Theory from the University of Michigan. Originally from Oklahoma, he is an enrolled citizen of the Seminole Nation.

 

This event is free and open to the public! Learn more about the PEN World Voices Festival here. 

After selling her first novel—a dream she’d worked long and hard for—Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she’d left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she’s pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn’t totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it’s possible to change the course of her history.

 

Lucid and honest, heart-breaking and full of hope, Stray is an examination of what we inherit and what we don’t have to, of what we have to face in ourselves to move forward, and what it’s like to let go of one’s parents in order to find a peace—and family—of one’s own.

 

Stephanie Danler is a writer based in Los Angeles, California.

 

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Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California.

 

Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history.

 

Morgan Jerkins is the New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing. She is a Senior Editor at Zora Magazine, a division of Medium, whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Elle, Rolling Stone, Lenny, and BuzzFeed, among many others. She lives in New York.

 

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“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’”

Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir. Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.

Saeed Jones is the author of Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. He earned a BA at Western Kentucky University and an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and tweets @TheFerocity.

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Novelist Porochista Khakpour’s family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up their successes only to be greeted by an alienating culture. Growing up as an immigrant in America means that one has to make one’s way through a confusing tangle of conflicting cultures and expectations. And Porochista is pulled between the glitzy culture of Tehrangeles, an enclave of wealthy Iranians and Persians in LA, her own family’s modest life and culture, and becoming an assimilated American. Porochista rebels—she bleaches her hair and flees to the East Coast, where she finds her community: other people writing and thinking at the fringes. But, 9/11 happens and with horror, Porochista watches from her apartment window as the towers fall. Extremism and fear of the Middle East rises in the aftermath and then again with the election of Donald Trump. Porochista is forced to finally grapple with what it means to be Middle-Eastern and Iranian, an immigrant, and a refugee in our country today.

 

Brown Album is a stirring collection of essays, at times humorous and at times profound, drawn from more than a decade of Porochista’s work and with new material included. Altogether, it reveals the tolls that immigrant life in this country can take on a person and the joys that life can give.

 

Porochista Khakpour’s debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune‘s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the First Fiction category. Her second novel The Last Illusion was a 2014 “Best Book of the Year” according to NPR, Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, PopMatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others. She has been guest faculty at VCFA and Stonecoast’s MFA programs, as well as Contributing Editor at Evergreen Review. Born in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, Khakpour currently lives in New York City.

 

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55 years have passed since the cover of Time Magazine proclaimed the death of God and while participation in mainstream religion has indeed plummeted, Americans have never been more spiritually busy.

 

While rejecting traditional worship in unprecedented numbers, today's Americans are embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures - from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right. As the Internet makes it ever-easier to find new "tribes," and consumer capitalism forever threatens to turn spirituality into a lifestyle brand, remarkably modern American religious culture is undergoing a revival comparable with the Great Awakenings of centuries past. Faith is experiencing not a decline but a Renaissance. Disillusioned with organized religion and political establishments alike, more and more Americans are seeking out spiritual paths driven by intuition, not institutions.

 

In STRANGE RITES, religious scholar and commentator Tara Isabella Burton visits with the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; Satanists and polyamorous communities, witches from Bushwick, wellness junkies and social justice activists and devotees of Jordan Peterson, proving Americans are not abandoning religion but remixing it. In search of the deep and the real, they are finding meaning, purpose, ritual, and communities in ever-newer, ever-stranger ways.

 

Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at The American Interest, a columnist at Religion News Service, and the former staff religion reporter at Vox.com. She has written on religion and secularism for National Geographic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more, and holds a doctorate in theology from Oxford. She is also the author of the novel Social Creature (Doubleday, 2018)

 

Jaya Saxena is Staff Writer at Eater.com, and her work can be found on Catapult, GQ, The New York Times, Elle, and more. She is the author of the forthcoming essay collection 'Crystal Clear' from Quirk Books. She lives in Queens.

 

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Love makes a family.

Riley is Papa’s princess and Daddy’s dragon. She loves her two fathers! When Riley’s classmate asks her which dad is her real one, Riley is confused. She doesn’t want to have to pick one or the other.

Families are made of love in this heartwarming story that shows there are lots of ways to be part of one.

Seamus Kirst is a writer whose work has been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, Forbes, The Advocate, and Vice. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @SeamusKirst or on Facebook @seamuspatrickkirst.

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Sixteen-year-old Randy Kapplehoff loves spending the summer at Camp Outland, a camp for queer teens. It's where he met his best friends. It's where he takes to the stage in the big musical. And it's where he fell for Hudson Aaronson-Lim -- who's only into straight-acting guys and barely knows not-at-all-straight-acting Randy even exists.

This year, though, it's going to be different. Randy has reinvented himself as 'Del' -- buff, masculine, and on the market. Even if it means giving up show tunes, nail polish, and his unicorn bedsheets, he's determined to get Hudson to fall for him.

But as he and Hudson grow closer, Randy has to ask himself: How much is he willing to change for love? And is it really love anyway, if Hudson doesn't know who he truly is?

L.C. Rosen, also known as Lev Rosen, has written several books for adults and children – including the young adult novel Jack of Hearts (and other parts), which Gay Times wrote “might be the most important queer novel of the decade.” Just in time for Pride Month, the paperback edition of Jack of Hearts (and other parts) will hit stores on May 26, 2020, alongside Rosen’s new YA novel, Camp. His books have been featured on numerous Best of the Year lists and nominated for several awards. He lives in New York City with his husband and a very small cat.

Adam Sass began writing books in Sharpie on the backs of Starbucks pastry bags. He’s sorry it distracted him from making your latte. Raised in an Illinois farm town, Adam now lives in California with his husband and dachshunds. His first novel, SURRENDER YOUR SONS, is out in Fall 2020.

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