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

• Ivy Pochoda in conversation w/ Megan Abbott 5/20
• Stephanie Danler in conversation w/ Dani Shapiro 5/22
• Kevin Noble Maillard's IGTV Storytime 5/23
• NYRB Book Club: Slow Days, Fast Company 5/25
• L.C. Rosen in conversation w/ Adam Sass 5/27
• Paragraph: Lexie Bean + Rae Mariah MacCarthy in conversation 5/27
• Visibility & Kinship w/ Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Sejal Shah, Souvankham Thammavongsa, + Tanaïs 5/28
• Queering the Hyphen w/ Arhm Choi Wild, Mary Jean Chan, Chen Chen, Margaret Rhee, + Yanyi 5/29
• Matt Ortile in conversation w/ Meredith Talusan 6/01
• Megha Majumdar in conversation w/ Nicole Chung 6/02
• Maulik Pancholy + Phil Stamper in conversation 6/03
• Paragraph: Ilana Masad + Laura Bogart  in conversation 6/03
• Kristen Millares Young w/ Tracy O'Neill + Weike Wang 6/04
• Little Lights Reading Series: Nabila Lovelace, Carlos Andrés Gómez, + Arhm Choi Wild 6/05
• Carole Lindstrom's IGTV Storytime 6/06
• Jean Kyoung Frazier in conversation w/ Alice Sola Kim 6/09
• Alysia Sawchyn in conversation w/ Kaveh Akbar + Marisa Siegel 6/10
• Red Ink Series: Defiance w/ Afia Atakora, Laura Bogart, Rachel Vorona Cote, + Amy Jo Burns 6/11
• Genevieve Hudson in conversation w/ Paul Lisicky 6/12
• A Celebration of Queer Voices: Corinne Manning, Carter Sickels, De'Shawn Charles Winslow, + Andrea Lawlor 6/15

 

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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This talk will be broadcast live via Zoom

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A conversation with Rae Mariah MacCarthy (Squad, Macmillan) and Jane Hoppen Resident Lexie Bean to celebrate the release of Lexie's debut novel, The Ship We Built. Inspired by Pixar movies, Mr. Rogers, The Little Prince, and growing up in the 90s, The Ship We Built tackles adult themes for a young audience. Lexie will read from the text, followed by the hosts holding dialogue on reclaiming and navigating childhood memory of queer-phobia, classism, and loss. Books will be made available to purchase through Books are Magic. 

*Each attendee is encouraged to bring a rock :)  (If you are able to)

 

Lexie Bean is a queer and trans multimedia artist from the Midwest. Their work in film, literature, and curation revolves around themes of bodies, homes, cyclical violence, and LGBTQIA+ identity. Lexie is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and passionate about creating honest and complex trans narratives that "transition and grow" alongside them. Their writing has been featured in Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, Ms. Magazine, Them, Logo's New Now Next, Bust Magazine, Autostraddle, and more. The Ship We Built is their debut novel supported with residencies at the Sundress Academy, Paragraph New York, and the Santa Cruz Bookshop. Like the protagonist, Lexie has a deep resonance with water, letter writing, and is also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. 

 

Rae Mariah MacCarthy (they/them) is an award-winning writer, a performer, and a birth parent. Their first novel, Squad, was published in Spring of 2019 by FSG. Washington Blade Springs Arts 2019 Book List Pick, Barnes & Noble Teen Blog's Most Anticipated LGBTQAP YA Book of 2019; "An openhearted debut that, like [protagonist] Jenna herself, has wonderfully surprising depth" ―Booklist; "Jenna certainly won me over, and so did Squad." ―NPR. 

 

Rae's plays have been performed and developed all over the world, from stages in Paris to New York City subway stations, and the New York Times called their immersive party play Mrs. Mayfield’s Fifth-Grade Class of ’93 20-Year Reunion “a lot of fun.” Awards: The Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award; Lotos Foundation Prize in the Arts and Sciences; PoNY nominee. They live in North Hollywood with their cat, Sophie.

 

This event is presented by Paragraph in partnership with Books Are Magic. Paragraph, an IRL workspace for writers pre-pandemic, is now an online community of writers staying inspired and connected with craft talks, write-ins, workshops, and engaging events like this conversation. Join our community!

This panel will be broadcast live via Zoom

Register to attend here

 

Books Are Magic is proud to present an AAPI Heritage Month panel on the topic of Visibility & Kinship. This panel will center South and Southeast Asian perspectives, featuring writers Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Sejal Shah, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Tanaïs as moderator. 

 

Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain. The novel, published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK), was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and currently splits time between Bangkok and Brooklyn.

 

Sejal Shah's debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, (University of Georgia Press, June 2020), maps a personal geography and explores movement, language, family, and place. Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, Longreads, and The Rumpus. The recipient of a 2018 NYFA fellowship in fiction, Sejal recently completed a story collection and is at work on a memoir about mental health and academia. She is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Rochester, New York.
 

Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand and was raised and educated in Toronto. She is the award-winning author of four books of poetry and her fiction has appeared in  Harper's,  Granta, the  Paris Review,  Ploughshares,  Best American Non-Required Reading 2018, and the  O. Henry Prize Stories 2019.

Tanaïs (née Tanwi Nandini Islam) is the author of the novel BRIGHT LINES (Penguin 2015), which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They are the founder of the independent beauty & fragrance house, Hi Wildflower, and their forthcoming essay collection, IN SENSORIUM (HMH 2021) explores scent, sensuality, South Asian and Muslim perfume cultures, and the environmental and border crises around the world.

This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

This reading will be broadcast live via Zoom. 

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How do we "queer the hyphen" without giving up citizenship to one of our communities? What does it take to unlearn the survival instinct of trauma? What does it take to choose our tools instead of wearing down the ones we’ve been handed? In Cut to Bloom, Arhm Choi Wild attempts to forge answers to these questions by navigating the hyphen, sometimes chasm, between the Asian and American identity, between queerness and the politics of belonging, between survival and the possibility of choice. They will be joined by Mary Jean Chan, Chen Chen, Margaret Rhee, and Yanyi. 

 

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 Kundiman fellow from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who holds a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Arhm was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019 and will have a poetry collection published by Write Bloody in 2020. Their work has been published in the anthology Daring to Repair by Wising Up Press and in the magazines Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Split this Rock, Foglifter, Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and others. They work as a social justice educator in New York City, and have competed in poetry slams and performed across the country, including at Brave New Voices, the New York City Poetry Festival, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and the Bowery Poetry Club. For more information, visit arhmchoiwild.com 

 

Margaret Rhee is the author of Love, Robot  (The Operating System, 2017) awarded the Best Book Prize in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association, the Elgin by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and named a 2017 Best Poetry Book by Entropy Magazine. As a scholar and new media artist, she’s taught at UCLA, Harvard University, and the University of Oregon. She holds a BA in English from the University of Southern California and Ph.D in Ethnic Studies and New Media Studies from UC Berkeley. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo where she teaches courses on film, technology, and feminist poetics.

Yanyi is a writer and critic. He is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World Random House, forthcoming 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in NPR's All Things Considered, Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and a poetry review editor at Public Books. Find him at yanyiii.com.

This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

This talk will be broadcast live via Zoom. 

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Join us for a conversation between Matt Ortile, author of THE GROOM WILL KEEP HIS NAME, and Meredith Talusan, author of FAIREST. 

 

About THE GROOM WILL KEEP HIS NAME:

 

When Matt Ortile’s family moved from Manila to Las Vegas, the locals couldn’t pronounce his name. Bullied for his brown skin, accent, and femininity, he couldn’t wait to move to New York, start over, and leave the past behind him – Filipino name included. In The Groom Will Keep His Name, Ortile traces his journey to an awakening of radical self-love.

 

When we date and mate, we tell stories about ourselves, trying to put our “best foot forward.” Dating apps and social media have encouraged us to further curate the face we show the world. Our personal myths, however true or false, reveal not just who we are, but who we want to be. The Groom Will Keep His Name explores the various fables Ortile has spun for himself: as a Vassar Girl, an American Boy, a card-carrying member of Gay Twitter, and a Filipino immigrant looking to build a home.

 

About FAIREST:

 

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community. She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man, and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved. Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni’s Room. Her evocative reflections will shift our own perceptions of love, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.

 

Matt Ortile is the managing editor of Catapult magazine. Previously, he was the global publishing lead for BuzzFeed International and the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. His writing has been published by BuzzFeed, Into, Self, and Out, among others. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Meredith Talusan is an award-winning author and journalist who is the founding executive editor of them.,Condé Nast's LGBTQ+ digital platform, where she is now a contributing editor. She has contributed to other books, including the New York Times bestseller Not That Bad (edited by Roxane Gay), Nasty Women, and Burn It Down. She writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, WIRED, Condé Nast Traveller, and many other publications. She lives in the Western Catskills with her spouse and rescue mutt.

This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

This talk will be broadcast live via Zoom. 

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Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely--an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.

 

Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.

 

Megha Majumdar was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She moved to the United States to attend college at Harvard University, followed by graduate school in social anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an editor at Catapult, and lives in New York City. A Burning is her first book.

 

Nicole Chung was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Her debut memoir All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, NPR, TIME, and Library Journal, among others. Nicole has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, GQ, Longreads, and Vulture. She is the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine and the former managing editor of The Toast. 

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This talk will be broadcast live via Zoom 

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Join us for a conversation between Maulik Pancholy, author of THE BEST AT IT, and Phil Stamper, author of THE GRAVITY OF US. 

 

About THE BEST AT IT: 

Rahul Kapoor is heading into seventh grade in a small town in Indiana. The start of middle school is making him feel increasingly anxious, so his favorite person in the whole world, his grandfather, Bhai, gives him some well-meaning advice: Find one thing you’re really good at and become the BEST at it.

 

Those four little words sear themselves into Rahul’s brain. While he’s not quite sure what that special thing is, he is convinced that once he finds it, bullies like Brent Mason will stop torturing him at school. And he won’t be worried about staring too long at his classmate Justin Emery. With his best friend, Chelsea, by his side, Rahul is ready to crush this challenge.... But what if he discovers he isn’t the best at anything?

 

About THE GRAVITY OF US: 

As a successful social media journalist with half a million followers, seventeen-year-old Cal is used to sharing his life online. But when his pilot father is selected for a highly publicized NASA mission to Mars, Cal and his family relocate from Brooklyn to Houston and are thrust into a media circus. 

 

Amidst the chaos, Cal meets sensitive and mysterious Leon, another “Astrokid,” and finds himself falling head over heels—fast. As the frenzy around the mission grows, so does their connection. But when secrets about the program are uncovered, Cal must find a way to reveal the truth without hurting the people who have become most important to him.

 

Maulik Pancholy is an award-winning actor whose career has spanned hit television shows (30 Rock, Whitney), animated favorites (Phineas and Ferb, Sanjay and Craig), the Broadway stage, and films. He served on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and he is the cofounder of the anti-bullying campaign Act to Change. Maulik lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his husband, Ryan, and his dog, T-Rex. The Best at It is his debut novel.

 

Phil Stamper grew up in a rural village near Dayton, Ohio. He has a B.A. in Music and an M.A. in Publishing with Creative Writing. He works for a major book publisher in New York City and lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog. THE GRAVITY OF US is his first novel. Find out more at philstamper.com

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Join us for a reading and conversation between Ilana Masad, author of ALL MY MOTHER’S LOVERS, one of Electric Literature’s "Most Anticipated Debuts of Early 2020, and Laura Bogart, author of DON’T YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU. Laura and Ilana will discuss their critically acclaimed debut novels which both deal with women returning home as adults and explore sexuality, grief and how the past haunts the present. 

 

Ilana Masad is a queer Israeli-American writer, essayist, and book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Paris Review, NPR, BuzzFeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She is the founder and host of The Other Stories podcast and a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also serves as the Assistant Nonfiction Editor for Prairie Schooner. ALL MY MOTHER’S LOVERS is her debut novel.

 

Laura Bogart is the author of DON’T YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU (Dzanc Books). She is also a non-fiction writer who focuses on personal essays, pop culture, film and TV, feminism, body image and sizeism, and politics. Laura is a featured contributor to The Week and DAME magazine; her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, SPIN, The AV Club, Vulture, and Indiewire, among others. 

 

This event is presented by Paragraph in partnership with Books Are Magic. Paragraph, an IRL workspace for writers pre-pandemic, is now an online community of writers staying inspired and connected with craft talks, write-ins, workshops, and engaging events like this conversation. Join our community!

This talk will be broadcast live via Zoom

Register to attend here

 

Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and a betrayal by her sister, in the throes of a midlife freefall, Latina anthropologist Claudia retreats from Seattle to Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of her guide, a spirited hoarder named Maggie. But when, spurred by his mother's failing memory, Maggie's prodigal son Peter returns seeking answers to his father's murder, Claudia discovers in him the abandon she craves. Through the passionate and violent collision of these two outsiders, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their imperfect attempts to find community on the Makah Indian Reservation.

 

Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2015, and Quotients, newly out from Soho Press. She was a 2015 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a 2012 Center for Fiction Fellow. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, BOMB, VQR, and The Believer. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University.

 

Weike Wang is the author of CHEMISTRY and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, among other publications.  She is the recipient of the 2018 Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35.  She lives in New York City.

 

Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction (Red Hen Press). A prize-winning journalist and essayist, Kristen serves as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle. Her reviews, essays and investigations appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Poetry Northwest, and the anthologies Pie & Whiskey, a New York Times New & Notable Book, and Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge). Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.

This event is free. Let us know you're coming on Facebook! 

This reading will be broadcast live via Zoom 

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Books Are Magic is proud to be a co-sponsor for the Little Lights Reading Series. The Little Lights Reading Series celebrates the bright lights, the folks who have been lighting the way not only before this pandemic but also as we chart a new course during these unprecedented times. This virtual room is a place for all folks to shine, especially people of color, womxn, queer, trans, and GNC folks in a celebration and cultivation of joy, pride, and community. 

 

This reading will feature poets Nabila Lovelace, Carlos Andrés Gómez, and Arhm Choi Wild.

 

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.

 

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet, speaker, actor, and author of Fractures, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Hijito, winner of the Broken River Prize and a #1 SPD bestseller, and the memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood, released by Penguin Random House. A star of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, TV One’s Verses and Flow, and Spike Lee’s #1 box office movie Inside Man with Denzel Washington, Carlos is widely known for his viral poems, “Where are you really from?” and “What Latino Looks Like,” which have garnered millions of views online. Winner of the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, he partnered with John Legend on Senior Orientation, a program to counteract bullying and champion inclusive masculinity among high school students. Carlos is a proud Latinx and father.

 

Arhm Choi Wild is a Kundiman fellow from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who holds a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Arhm was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019 and will have a poetry collection published by Write Bloody in 2020. Their work has been published in the anthology Daring to Repair by Wising Up Press and in the magazines Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Split this Rock, Foglifter, Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and others. They work as a social justice educator in New York City, and have competed in poetry slams and performed across the country, including at Brave New Voices, the New York City Poetry Festival, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and the Bowery Poetry Club. For more information, visit arhmchoiwild.com 

This storytime reading will be posted on Books Are Magic's IGTV.

A bold and lyrical picture book about protecting nature's most sacred resources.
 

Water is the first medicine.

It affects and connects us all.

Water is sacred.

 

My people talk of a black snake that will destroy the land,

Spoil the water, wreck everything in its path.

They foretold that it wouldn’t come for many, many years.

 

Now the black snake is here.

 

Told from the perspective of a Native American child, this bold and lyrical picture book written by Ojibwe/Métis author Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Tlingit artist Michaela Goade is a powerful call to action to defend Earth’s natural resources—inspired by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and similar movements led by Indigenous tribes all across North America.

 

Carole Lindstrom is Anishinabe/Métis and is a proud member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe Indians. She was born and raised in Nebraska and currently makes her home in Maryland. She is the author of Girls Dance, Boys Fiddle.

This talk will be broadcast live via Zoom. 

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Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She’s grieving the death of her father (whom she has more in common with than she’d like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.

 

Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son’s happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.

 

Jean Kyoung Frazier lives in Los Angeles. Pizza Girl is her debut novel.

 

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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This talk, co-hosted by Burrow Press and The Rumpus, will be broadcast live via Zoom. 

Register to attend here. 

 

At age 18 Alysia Sawchyn was diagnosed with bipolar I. Seven years later she learned she had been misdiagnosed. A Fish Growing Lungs takes the form of linked essays that reflect on Sawchyn's diagnosis and its unraveling, the process of withdrawal and recovery, and the search for identity as she emerges from a difficult past into a cautiously hopeful present.

 

Sawchyn captures the precariousness of life under the watchful eye of doctors, friends, and family, in which saying or doing the wrong thing could lead to involuntary confinement. This scrutiny is compounded by the stigmas of mental illness and the societal expectations placed on the bodies of women and women of color. And yet, amid juggling medications, doubting her diagnosis, and struggling with addiction and cutting, there is also joy, friendship, love, and Slayer concerts.

 

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.

 

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of two full-length collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2017). The recipient of a Levis Reading Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Kaveh is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

 

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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This panel will be broadcast live via Zoom 

Register here to attend

 

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), Tiana Clark (I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood), 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.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016). Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University) and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Washington Post, VQR, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

 

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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In this bewitching debut novel, a sensitive teen, newly arrived in Alabama, falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. While his German parents don’t know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives in the thick heat. Taken in by the football team, he learns how to catch a spiraling ball, how to point a gun, and how to hide his innermost secrets.

 

Max already expects some of the raucous behavior of his new, American friends—like their insatiable hunger for the fried and cheesy, and their locker room talk about girls. But he doesn’t expect the comradery—or how quickly he would be welcomed into their world of basement beer drinking. In his new canvas pants and thickening muscles, Max feels like he’s “playing dress-up.” That is until he meets Pan, the school “witch,” in Physics class: “Pan in his all black. Pan with his goth choker and the gel that made his hair go straight up.” Suddenly, Max feels seen, and the pair embarks on a consuming relationship: Max tells Pan about his supernatural powers, and Pan tells Max about the snake poison initiations of the local church. The boys, however, aren’t sure whose past is darker, and what is more frightening—their true selves, or staying true in Alabama.

 

Genevieve Hudson is the author of the novel Boys of Alabama: a novel (2020). Their other books include the critical memoir A Little in Love with Everyone (2018), and Pretend We Live Here: Stories (2018), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist.  Their work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Catapult, Bookforum, Tin House, No Tokens, Bitch and other places. They have received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. They are a Visiting Fiction Faculty member at Antioch University-Los Angeles’s MFA Program, a freelance writer, and also work in advertising. They live in Portland, Oregon.

 

Paul Lisicky is the author of the memoir Later: My Life At the Edge of the World (Graywolf), as well as The Narrow Door (a New York Times Editors' Choice), Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he has served on the Writing Committee since 2000. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. He is currently an Associate Professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

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Join us for A Celebration of Queer Voices panel featuring Corinne Manning, Carter Sickels, De'Shawn Charles Winslow, and Andrea Lawlor as moderator. 

 

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals including Ploughshares, Mutha, the Millions, jubilat, the Brooklyn Rail, Faggot Dinosaur, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards. Paul, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, is out now from Vintage/Knopf in the US and Picador UK in the UK & Ireland.

 

Corinne Manning is a prose writer and literary organizer whose stories and essays have been published widely, including the anthologies Toward an Ethics of Activism and Shadow Map: An Anthology of Survivors of Sexual Assault. They have received grants and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Artist Trust, and the Hub City Writers Project. Corinne founded the James Franco Review, a project that sought to address implicit bias in the publishing industry. They live in Seattle.

 

Carter Sickels is the author of novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press 2020). He is also the author of the novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury 2012), an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His essays and fiction have appeared a variety of publications, including Guernica, BuzzFeed, Bellevue Literary Review, and Green Mountains Review. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University.

 

De'Shawn Charles Winslow was born and raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His novel, In West Mills, was the 2019 winner of the 2019 Center For Fiction First Novel Prize. He is a 2017 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and holds a BFA in creative writing and an MA in English literature from Brooklyn College. He lives in New York.

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