Malvern Books

Austin Writers Roulette features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who love to perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Twisted Legacy.” Spinning tangled tales, the featured artists will be: BIRDMAN 313, KATHLEEN MAJORSKY, HOPE RUIZ, MAGIC JACK ATX, BRIAN GROSZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic will follow intermission. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for the nineteenth event in our Novel Night series, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: two published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. We’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles and invite questions from the audience. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month our readers will be Myra Mcilvain and Elizabeth Thomas. Myra will be reading from her newest book, The Doctor’s Wife, a work of historical fiction set in nineteenth-century Texas. Elizabeth will be reading from Arden’s Act, her historical romance set in seventeenth-century London.

Myra Hargrave McIlvain is a teller of Texas tales. Whether she is sharing the stories in her books, her lectures, or her blog, she aims to make the Texas story alive. She has free-lanced as a writer of Texas historical markers, written articles for newspapers all over the country and for magazines such as Texas Highways. The Doctor’s Wife is her eighth book—another Texas story. McIlvain lives in Austin with her husband Stroud. Her children are grown, and she enjoys the company of a houseful of grands.

Elizabeth Thomas was born in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. She earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her first job after leaving U of M was as an editor and writer for the Gale Group’s Contemporary Authors. For a few years Elizabeth lived in Tucson, Arizona, where her children, Lisa and Joseph, were born. In 1996 she moved to Cedar Park, Texas, a suburb of Austin, where she still resides. In the Austin area, she worked for Barrett Kendall Publishing, and continued to work on her own writing projects. When Barrett Kendall began a precipitous decline, Elizabeth realized she had to change careers, and in 2005 graduated as a registered nurse from Austin Community College. Elizabeth has won prizes in numerous writing competitions, and has had a short story published in Mytholog. Her full-length play, The Circle, has received a stage reading in Birmingham, Michigan, and full production as a special event by the Way Off Broadway Community Theater in Leander, Texas.

Join three Austin indie authors as they read selections from their works and discuss how they made the leap to indie publishing. This month’s guests are James Lopez, Alex Bexar, and Catherine De Young (left to right, below). James will be reading from Sound and Fury / Shakespeare Goes Punk, a collection of alt-punk short stories based on Shakespeare’s works. Alex will be reading from her young adult science fiction title, Now You’re Dead. And Catherine will be sharing her two memoirs, Life In The Trenches: A Retrospective and Life In The Trenches: My Stories.

This event is organized by Write It Already, a local meet-up that encourages people to write—and finish what they start. There will be light refreshments and books by the authors for sale at the event.

H. James Lopez was born on a Navy ship in the Caribbean Sea outside of Barranquilla. He is a construct of too much sun, too much alcohol, and not nearly enough time on land. Since 2009 he has been writing fiction in all the forms which come to mind. Current complete works include two books on Military/Urban fiction including The Blue Star Workaround and The Vegas Slingshot. Also a High Fantasy novel in review and a book about steam warfare in Texas at the time of the Republic.

Alex Bexar, not your typical little girl growing up in the rural South. While most little girls her age were playing with their dolls and wearing frilly dresses, Alex spent her time listening to her uncles and older cousins tell stories about their experiences in the military, reading books about space travel, and watching scary movies. When school was out for the summer, Alex, her friends, and cousins would go out into the woods to plan secret missions and rescue kidnapped spies. Since childhood, Alex has been writing and telling stories to entertain friends and family. Today, Alex Bexar lives in Central Texas and has retired from a career in contract management.

While studying at Parsons School of Design-Los Angeles, Catherine DeYoung created socio-anthropological vignettes of life in the city through her photography. The next ten years she worked in various photographic roles in Hollywood, government/aerospace, and also litigation graphics. After joining the crime lab of a major metropolitan police department, Catherine spent the next six years investigating over 6,000 crime scenes. Now, living back in Texas, she writes about her life in crime. Rumor has it that she inspired a certain character on a certain television show after Hollywood writers came to visit the crime lab.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld & Schandra Madha. Featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are E. KRISTIN ANDERSON, SARAH FRANCES MORAN, & SAMANTHA DUNCAN.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Nathan Brown’s latest poetry collection, My Salvaged Heart: Story of a Cautious Courtship. With readings from Nathan Brown and Katherine Hoerth.

Naomi Shihab Nye recently said about My Salvaged Heart: “Brave new world! The sizzle of couplings and uncouplings—attraction and romance, ineffable magnetism, mysterious as ever—but doused with a savory dose of Nathan Brown humor, a tilted long-ranging eye that sees the next bend in the road even when he’s standing right here, firmly planted.”

Nathan Brown (pictured above; photo by Rodney Bursiel) is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a PhD in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma where he taught for seventeen years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14 and mostly travels now, performing readings and concerts, as well as speaking and leading workshops in schools, libraries, and community organizations on creativity and creative writing. Nathan has published twelve books. Most recent is My Salvaged Heart: Story of a Cautious Courtship. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. He’s taught memoir, songwriting, performance, and creativity workshops for the Sisters Folk Festival in Oregon, the Taos Poetry Festival, the Woody Guthrie Festival, the Everwood Farmstead Foundation in Wisconsin, as well as Blue Rock Artist Ranch near Austin, Texas.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of four poetry books. Her most recent book, Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots (Lamar University Literary Press, 2014) won the Helen C. Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has been included in journals such as Concho River Review, Pleiades, and Tupelo Quarterly. She teaches writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and serves as poetry editor of Amarillo Bay and Devilfish Review.

Malvern Books is closed all day today, July 24th, for a staff party.

Please join us at Malvern Books for Fantastical Fictions, an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures hosted by Rebecca Schwarz and Chris Brown. We plan to bring together writers and readers of fantastic literature in Austin by featuring published writers reading from new works and from examples of fantastic literature available on our shelves. Discussion, Q&A sessions, and open mic for works in progress will follow the readings.

Please email us to sign up for our Fantastical Fictions email list if you’d like to receive news about our upcoming fantastic literature events, as well as announcements about new works of fantastic literature in the store.

This month’s guest is Rick Klaw, editor of The Apes of Wrath, a provocative short story anthology that delves into our fascination with and dread of our simian cousins.

“This impressive anthology includes eighteen short stories by authors ancient (Aesop) and recent (Karen Joy Fowler, Mary Robinette Kowal), as well as three original articles tracing apes in literature, comics, cinema, and theater…. A powerful exploration of the blurry line between animal and human.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“These are all fine additions to any fantasy lover’s library…. Climb up into your tree, peel a banana, and enjoy the treats herein.” —Sci Fi Magazine

Professional freelance reviewer, geek maven, and optimistic curmudgeon, Rick Klaw  recently edited Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard and the acclaimed anthologies The Apes of Wrath and Rayguns Over Texas. His countless reviews and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Austin Chronicle, Blastr, San Antonio Current, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, SF Site, The Horn, The San Antonio Business Journal, Geek Dad, Steampunk, and Cross Plains Universe. Many of these were collected in his book Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

It’s poetry karaoke time! Held on the first Monday of each month, Malvern Karaoke Mondays is a fun FREE event featuring adventurous verses, snack surprises, and a monthly haiku competition.

Here’s how poetry karaoke works: you roll a 20-sided lettered die and select a poem by a poet whose last name starts with the letter the die landed on—and then you read this poem aloud for everyone to enjoy. (Poems can be chosen from a book on our shelves, or from one of the anthologies we’ll provide.) Everyone is welcome to take part, but please note that participants can’t read their own poetry—poetry karaoke is all about introducing people to the poems and poets that have inspired you.

And if you fancy yourself as a haiku whiz, you should enter our monthly haiku contest, judged by our curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe (and/or a guest judge of his choosing). For this month’s contest you’ll need to provide the first and third lines that best accompany this second line:

rats live on no evil star

COMPETITION CONDITIONS: Haiku must be submitted to info@malvernbooks.com by midnight on Saturday, July 30th. We’ll announce the winner at the event on Monday. Prize = $10 Malvern Gift Card (which must be picked up in-store) and you’ll be listed in our BOOK OF HAIKU WINNERS. All decisions final. No crying!

Join us in celebrating the launch of Christopher Carmona’s debut short story collection, The Road to Llorona Park.

The Road to Llorona Park is a collection of short fiction about the changing world of la frontera/the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. The stories center around the current times when the political upheavals of Mexico began to effect peoples lives on both sides of the border.

“Carmona is a gifted storyteller. The stories in this collection are thematically courageous and the characters are tender, funny, harsh and loving all at once. He has written a vibrant and honest portrayal of a place with complicated characters who face an unjust system and world. These necessary stories will burn in your memory for a long, long while.”—Angie Cruz, author of Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee

Christopher Carmona was the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Langdon Review Writers Residency Program in 2015. His story, “Strange Leaves,” was the third finalist in the Texas Observer Short Story Contest of 2014. He was also a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013. He has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Trickster Literary Journal, Interstice, vandal., Bordersenses, and the Sagebrush Review. His first collection of short stories, entitled The Road to Llorona Park, was published by Stephen F. Austin University Press in 2016. He has recently edited an anthology called Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World for Slough Press and was a co-editor for The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writing. He was also a co-author for a scholarly conversation book entitled Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Identities and he has two collections of poetry: beat and I Have Always Been Here. Finally, he is the Artistic Director of the Coalition of New Chican@ Artists.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Twenty Girls to Envy Me (University of Texas Press), an English-Hebrew poetry collection from the Israeli writer Orit Gidali. This event will feature readings and a discussion with the book’s translator, Marcela Sulak. Marian Schwartz will also read from her recent translation of Calligraphy Lesson (co-translated with Leo Shtutin, Sylvia Maizell, and Mariya Bashkatova), the first English-language collection of short stories by Mikhail Shishkin.

Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected and New Poems of Orit Gidali features three dozen poems by the extraordinary Israeli writer Orit Gidali (b. 1972; pictured above), a unique voice among her contemporaries. Gidali’s work appears to focus on the domestic, but for her, the domestic sphere is the stage on which the drama of the geopolitical is reworked on an individual scale. The domestic is always inhabited by the Other, who in these deeply personal poems appears in various guises: a Palestinian mother, biblical figures, the poet’s own deceased mother, and her husband’s first wife. Gidali creates a space in her world to imaginatively reconfigure the current political impasses of the region through a focus on relationship and openness. Gidali’s poems, beautifully captured in English by Marcela Sulak, present a world beset by danger and uncertainty, yet they nonetheless cry out for community, connection, cooperation, and coexistence.

Orit Gidali has published three collections of poetry, as well as a children’s book. She teaches at Tel Aviv University and organizes workshops in collaboration with the author Eshkol Nevo.

Marcela Sulak is the author of two collections of poetry, Decency (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and one poetry chapbook, Of all the things that don’t exist, I love you best (Finishing Line Press, 2008). She has co-edited Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press, 2015). Her four book-length poetry translations from Hebrew, Czech, and French include Twenty Girls to Envy Me (University of Texas Press, 2016), A Bouquet of Czech Folktales by Karel Jaromir Erben (Twisted Spoon Press, 2012), May by Karel Hynek Macha (Twisted Spoon Press, 2005, 2010), and Bela-Wenda. Poems from the Heart of Africa by Mutumbo Nkulu-N’Sengha (Host Publications, 2011). She is an Associate Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University, and she is an editor at The Ilanot Review. She also hosts a weekly literary podcast on the online radio station TLV.1 called “Israel in Translation.”

Marian Schwartz has translated Russian classic and contemporary fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art for over forty years. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and has retranslated half a dozen Russian classics, including Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In addition to half the stories in Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories of Mikhail Shishkin, she also translated Shishkin’s novel Maidenhair for Open Letter Books. Forthcoming in January 2017 is her translation of Andrei Gelasimov’s novel Into the Thickening Fog.

Join us for the twentieth event in our Novel Night series, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: two published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. We’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles and invite questions from the audience. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month our readers will be Marcia Feldt and D. Ellis Phelps. Marcia will be reading from her debut novel, The Oys & Joys, which has been described as “Golden Girls meets Sex and the City.” D. Ellis Phelps will be reading from her book, Making Room for George, a story of a woman whose life takes a surprising turn when her father-in-law comes to stay.

Marcia Feldt is an Amazon bestselling author of her debut novel, The Oys & Joys. Marcia enjoys performing onstage, traveling anywhere at anytime (flying over Mt. Everest, a favorite so far), and writing her next novel.

D. Ellis Phelps’ recent publications include the novel Making Room for George; Moon Shadow (Sanctuary Press, 2016); art, essays, and poetry in Voices de la Luna (forthcoming, August 2016); Tupelo Press 30/30 Project (March 2016); Energy magazine, Nov/Dec 2015; and Poet’s Billow (Bermuda Triangle Prize for Poetry, 2015).

Join us for a reading with a rad lineup of poets both touring and local. Featuring Jon Nakai Valjean, Elijah Pearson, alli simone defeo, EE Jarvie, and EVIL MTN—a bunch of post-alt-lit poets trying to make a living in this topsy turvy world. This poetry event will be heavily influenced by positivity, love, and nature.

JON NAKAI VALJEAN is the long lost son of nic cage. born of pure declaration stealing adrenaline, under a blood moon on a friday. has a special connection to bread. favorite movie: con air (no relation)

EVIL MTN is an evil mtn @evilmtn

EE JARVIE is a poet living in austin, tx. they spew nonsense/feelings/nonsense feelings on twitter dot com @itseejarvie

ELIJAH PEARSON (@smallpuddle) is 21 which means they can Legally drink hahahahaha wild so chill and cool.

ALLI SIMONE DEFEO is a traveling poet and visual artist. they are a lover of horses and carry 25 stones in their backpack because they are a magician. they are also known as the fastest poet alive.

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “New Unwritten Rules.” The featured artists are: DONNA DECHEN BIRDWELL, HOPE RUIZ, UDELLE ROBINSON, BRIAN GROSZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us in celebrating the recent publication of Bernard Pearce’s The Deed To My Bones, a collection of poems, photos, and visual art. Featuring spoken word and poetry readings from Bernard Pearce, Jim Trainer, and Brian Grosz.

Bernard Pearce (above left) is a Louisiana native born in the rural community of St. Martin Parish. He attended St. John’s College in Santa Fe, and returned to Louisiana to pursue a life immersed in music and art. He has owned and operated several music and arts venues in Lafayette, Louisiana. Bernard has recorded and released two full-length recordings with his band One Man Machine and has toured internationally with this group. He has participated in a residency sponsored and organized by The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York City. Bernard has also read at the Allen Ginsberg memorial. Bernard has recently published a collection of poems, photos, and visual art entitled The Deed to My Bones.

Jim Trainer’s (above center) work has appeared in Raw Paw 6: Alien, The Waggle, Philadelphia Stories, Divergent Magazine, Anthology Philly, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, Verbicide Magazine, A Series of Moments and PoetryInk. The release of September, his second full-length collection of poetry, coincides with the founding of Yellow Lark Press. Trainer lives in Austin, Texas where he serves as curator of Going For The Throat, a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence, and romance.

Brian Grosz (above right) is a storyteller, actor, voiceover artist, painter, graphic designer, chef, cooking instructor, musician, tattoo enthusiast and an aging Eagle Scout trapped in a punk rock ethos. Squalor, his premiere collection of poetry and essays is out now. He currently calls Austin his home but still talks like a New Yorker—loud, fast, and crass.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us for a brand-new FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless poetic universe!

Held on the fourth Tuesday of every month and hosted by François Pointeau, Malvern’s Multi-Verse will feature readings from guest poets, plus a Q & A session. Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month François will be talking with local poets Michael Gilmore and Richard Cole.

Michael Gilmore was born on Port Royal Island, South Carolina and as a child grew up on Marine Corps, Navy, and Army bases from coast to coast. After serving in the Army himself, he moved to Austin and attended the University of Texas. In the 80’s he co-founded and co-edited Aileron, a literary journal, publishing the likes of David Weavil, Christopher Middleton, Daisy Aldan, and Charles Bukowski. It was at this time, his own first book of poetry, Lyrika, was published. In 1989, he married and moved, first to Taipei, then New York City, Iowa, and Hsin Chu, before returning to Austin in 1999, where he has since resided. In 2008, Dalton Publishing released Restless Astronomy, new and selected poems. He currently works for the University of Texas.

Richard Cole was born in Krum, Texas. He has published two books of poetry, The Glass Children (The University of Georgia Press) and Success Stories (Limestone Books). His third book, Song of the Middle Manager, was recently accepted by Kalos Press and will be released in 2017. He is also the author of a memoir, Catholic by Choice (Loyola Press). Honors include an NEA fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series award, and a Bush Foundation grant. His poems and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Poetry, Hudson Review, Sun Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and Image Journal—Good Letters. Cole is also a painter. His oil paintings have appeared in Windhover Journal and several galleries in Austin. Cole works as a freelance business writer. He has never taken a writing workshop, though he has taught quite a few. 

In association with Bat City Review, join us in celebrating the launch of Susan Briante’s new poetry collection, The Market Wonders. Susan will be joined by writers Rebecca Liu, Corey Miller, and Maya Perez.

In The Market Wonders, the Market itself becomes a thinking person: lover, parent, poet, philosopher. . . . Briante pushes the poetic domain beyond the lyric, beyond traditional subjects like nature (although the poet’s consciousness omits nothing: cardinals in a tree, for instance), and into enumeration as meditation, money movement as an overarching shared consciousness. Briante turns the expectations of poetry upside down when she explains “I wish more poets would write about money,” and a fairytale narrated in footnotes suddenly has exact measurement thrust into it. By the end of the book, we see how financial theories, rightly or wrongly applied can distort the ordinary acts of living, impoverish entire communities. There is nothing, however, impoverished about The Market Wonders, a work rich with marvels drawn from our ordinary world.

Photo of Susan Briante: Cybele Knowles

Susan Briante’s most recent book The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. The Kenyon Review calls it “masterful at every turn.” She is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011), both from Ahsahta Press. Of Utopia Minus, Publisher’s Weekly declared: “this book finds an urgent language for the world in which we live.” Briante also writes essays on documentary poetics as well as on the relationship between place and cultural memory. Some of these can be found in Creative Non-Fiction, Rethinking History, Jacket2 and The Believer. Her poems and essays been collected in the anthologies The Force of What’s Possible, The Volta Book of Poets, Devouring the Green, The Arcadia Project: the North American Postmodern Pastoral, Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare, and An Introduction to the Prose Poem.

A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals Bomb, Bombay Gin, Translation Review and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (among many others) as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.

Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture. New work has been published in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Guernica and The Progressive. Her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, cross-genre writing, experimental autobiography, documentary studies, affect theory, and translation. She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Arizona.

Rebecca Liu is a third year poet at the Michener Center for Writers. Her recent poems can be found in Boston Review, VOLT, Web Conjunctions, and Gulf Coast.

Corey Miller was born in southern Illinois and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere.

Maya Perez is a screenwriter and fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Masters Review and Electric Literature and she is co-editor of the books On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft and the upcoming On Story: Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films, both from University of Texas Press. Maya is also a producer for the Emmy Award-winning television series On Story: Presented by Austin Film Festival, now in its sixth season on PBS. She is a graduate of Vassar College and the Michener Center for Writers.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha, and featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!). This month’s I Screamers are *ELLIE FRANCIS DOUGLASS, DANIELLE ZACCAGNINO, & MEG GRIFFITTS.*

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us for a reading with UT Austin faculty members. Readers include Deb Olin Unferth, Edward Carey, Lisa Olstein, and Laurie Saurborn (left to right below).

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of three books. Her next book, a collection of stories, is coming out in March of 2017 from Graywolf. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. She is an associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin, and she teaches a workshop at a penitentiary in southern Texas.

Edward Carey is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva the Twins who Saved a City, and of the Iremonger Trilogy, all of which he illustrated. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. Born in England he now finds himself in Austin, Texas.

Lisa Olstein is the author of three poetry collections, most recently LITTLE STRANGER. This fall Essay Press will release THE RESEMBLANCE OF THE ENZYMES OF GRASSES TO THOSE OF WHALES IS A FAMILY RESEMBLANCE, a winner of their 2015 chapbook contest. A new full-length collection, LATE EMPIRE, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2017.

Laurie Saurborn is the author of two poetry collections, Industry of Brief Distraction and Carnavoria, and a chapbook, Patriot. An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient, her short stories, poems, reviews and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as American Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. Laurie teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also directs the undergraduate creative writing program. She is currently at work on a collection of stories.

It’s poetry karaoke time! Held on the first Monday of each month, Malvern Karaoke Mondays is a fun FREE event featuring adventurous verses, snack surprises, and a monthly haiku competition. And this month we have a special musical guest: come by at 6.45pm for live folk/blues from award-winning singer/songwriter Anji Kat with Christopher Cesta.

Here’s how poetry karaoke works: you roll a 20-sided lettered die and select a poem by a poet whose last name starts with the letter the die landed on—and then you read this poem aloud for everyone to enjoy. (Poems can be chosen from a book on our shelves, or from one of the anthologies we’ll provide.) Everyone is welcome to take part, but please note that participants can’t read their own poetry—poetry karaoke is all about introducing people to the poems and poets that have inspired you.

And if you fancy yourself as a haiku whiz, you should enter our monthly haiku contest, judged by our curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe (and/or a guest judge of his choosing). To enter, please supply the first and third lines to complete this second line (and remember, the first and third lines must each be five syllables!):

Second line: Melting in the summer heat

COMPETITION CONDITIONS: Haiku must be submitted to info@malvernbooks.com by midnight on Sunday, September 4th. We’ll announce the winner at the event on Monday. Prize = $10 Malvern Gift Card (which must be picked up in-store) and you’ll be listed in our BOOK OF HAIKU WINNERS. All decisions final. No crying!

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! This month we have something rather special: we’re hosting the launch of Joe Kilgore’s latest novel, A Farmhouse In The Rain (shortlisted for the Writers’ Village International Novel Award). We’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles and invite questions from the audience. And jazz guitarist Margaret Slovak will get the evening off to a great start with live music.

Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

A Farmhouse In The Rain is a novel of war and peace, crime and punishment, love and loss, and eventually hope. It’s a sweeping saga of three American soldiers and the women they love before, during, and after World War II.

During the war, the three are given shelter by a French woman. The next morning she is found dead and the trio realize they were the only ones in the house. No one admits guilt yet the event affects them radically and leads to big questions. Who will survive the war? Who will survive the peace? Who will reunite with the love each left behind? And who will be unmasked as the murderer on that fateful night at A Farmhouse In The Rain?

Filled with suspense, sacrifice, and subplots that interlock smoothly, the author’s dark chronicle of lives bound together by fate is a solid addition to the WWII thriller genre. —The US Review 

Joe Kilgore is the author of over twenty short stories and four novels. His short stories have been published in magazines, creative journals, anthologies, and online literary publications. Before turning to fiction, he had a long and successful career with international advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. In addition to his fiction, Joe writes for Austin advertising firm, Bazzirk, Inc., and also serves as a professional book reviewer. He lives in Lakeway with his wife, Claudia, an accomplished artist.

This month we have a special edition of Fantastical Fictions—we’re celebrating the publication of Nisi Shawl’s alternate history/steampunk/historical fantasy novel Everfair. Join Nisi and host Christopher Brown for a reading and discussion.

Nisi Shawl’s Everfair is a book with gorgeous sweep, spanning years and continents, loves and hates, histories and fantasies. Set against the big canvas of King Leopold’s horrific rule in the Congo, her engaging, passionate characters struggle to make the right choices in a world that is almost ours, but not quite. Everfair is sometimes sad, often luminous, and always original. —Karen Joy Fowler

Everfair is an alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated. Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into an exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history.

Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. They are the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Their short stories have appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. Their story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and their stories have been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award.

Fantastical Fictions is an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures. Please email us to sign up for our Fantastical Fictions email list if you’d like to receive news about our upcoming fantastic literature events, as well as announcements about new works of fantastic literature in the store.

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Cultural Mosaic.” The diverse collection of cultural storytellers is: HOPE RUIZ, LUUK BERTUS, KAMILA FORSON, DANIEL DAVILA, MAGIC JACK ATX, VELMA M. ROBERSON, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, BRIAN GROSZ, & THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kimberly Lambright’s new poetry collection, Ultra-Cabin (2015 winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award). With readings from Kimberly Lambright and Ben Kopel.

About Ultra-Cabin:

Combining the raw confessional with post-ironic deconstruction, the poems in Ultra-Cabin catalog the uneven hardships of language and connection with so much triumph and backdoor playfulness that you may find yourself moved and utterly abandoned to your greater self.

“Artful and wry, smart and moving—Kimberly Lambright’s poems are made of such carefully rendered moments that the mundane becomes very wonderfully strange. Ultra-Cabin is a book that will knock you out and invite you in, sometimes in the same brilliant breath.”—Kathryn Nuernberger

“I am stunned by Kimberly Lambright’s verbal acuity, its lightning shifts and sudden, diamond-like stillnesses. And there are images in this book that would wake Breton from the dead. Hats off to this uniquely adventurous and mature first volume.”—Christopher Howell

“Emotive and cerebral, giving way to the surrealities of intuition and pushing back with a keen intelligence.” —Ruth Williams

Kimberly Lambright is a poet and scholar living in Austin, Texas. She studied cultural theory at NYU and creative writing at Eastern Washington University. She’s a MacDowell Colony fellow and her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, Bone Bouquet, The Boiler, Wicked Alice, and Big Bridge. Her first full-length collection of poems, Ultra-Cabin (2016), is the winner of the 2015 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Ben Kopel is the author of VICTORY, which came out from H_NGM_N Books in 2012. He teaches classes on composition, creative writing, literature, and media studies at Skybridge Academy, an independent school in Dripping Springs. He is sporadically at work on a new collection of poems possibly titled Sutras of Love & Hate.

Join us for an afternoon with writer Dave Oliphant, who will be reading from his new poetry collection, María’s Book (Alamo Bay Press). Dave will also be sharing poems from the new edition of Figures of Speech (Host Publications), his translation of renowned Chilean poet Enrique Lihn’s collected work. And we’ll get the afternoon off to a great start with live music from jazz guitarist Margaret Slovak (from 3.30pm).

A book forty-one years in the making, written between 1975 and 2016, Dave Oliphant’s María’s Book presents what Douglas Flaherty has called “a delicately passionate record of an internationally conspired love affair. Oliphant’s poems to his wife are valentines for the ages.” With its publication in 2016, María’s Book marks the golden anniversary of Dave and María’s marriage.

Enrique Lihn’s writings, both creative and critical, are considered in Chile some of the most significant in the country’s distinguished literary history. This bilingual volume is the most complete collection of Lihn’s work in English. As well as some of Lihn’s familiar poems, this volume includes representative poems from a number of his later books, previously uncollected pieces, and selections from his final moving sequence, Diary of Death.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha, and featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!). This month’s I Screamers are Julie Howd, Claire Bowman, and Paz Pardo.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join three Austin indie authors as they read selections from their works and discuss how they made the leap to indie publishing. This month’s guests are Christy Esmahan, Aaron S. Gallagher, and Carolyn Cohagan (left to right, below). Christy will be reading from Sinco, a love story set in Spain. Aaron will be reading from Magician, Martyr, and Bleecker, his urban fantasy and detective novels. And Carolyn will be introducing us to Time Zero, a Young Adult Dystopian novel.

Christy Esmahan grew up in Cincinnati. She attended Miami University, then received a doctorate from the Universidad de Leon in Spain. She lived in the Basque Country and worked at an American International School for four years. Her first three novels are based on her experiences there. Bueno, her first novel, was a semi-finalist for the 2014 Elixir Press Fiction Award and Sinco, her second novel, is a finalist for this year’s International Latino Book Awards.

Aaron S. Gallagher was born in Syracuse, New York. He started writing when he was five years old. He has written eleven novels and six books of poetry, and has been published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Ares Magazine. He writes mystery, crime, urban fantasy, straight fiction, and thrillers.

Carolyn Cohagan began her writing career on the stage. She has performed stand-up and one-woman shows at festivals around the world from Adelaide to Edinburgh. Her first novel, The Lost Children, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2010, became part of the Scholastic Book Club in 2011, and was nominated for a Massachusetts Children’s Book Award in 2014. Carolyn recently moved back to her hometown of Austin, where she founded Girls With Pens, a creative writing organization dedicated to fostering the individual voices and offbeat imaginations of girls ages 8-17.

This event is organized by Write It Already, a local meet-up that encourages people to write—and finish what they start. There will be light refreshments and books by the authors for sale at the event.

Join us for an evening with poets Tracey Knapp, Patrick Ryan Frank, and Kimberly Lambright.

Tracey Knapp is the author of Mouth, winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2014. She has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, Five Points, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, The Carolina Quarterly and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.

Patrick Ryan Frank is the author of the poetry collections The Opposite of People and How the Losers Love What’s Lost, which won the 2010 Intro Prize from Four Way Books. He studied poetry at Northwestern University, Boston University, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. He was recently a Fulbright Fellow to Iceland, and he currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Kimberly Lambright is a poet and scholar living in Austin, Texas. She studied cultural theory at NYU and creative writing at Eastern Washington University. She’s a MacDowell Colony fellow and her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, Bone Bouquet, The Boiler, Wicked Alice, and Big Bridge. Her first full-length collection of poems, Ultra-Cabin (2016), is the winner of the 2015 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Join us in celebrating the 90th birthday of esteemed poet, translator, educator, and editor Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth. We’ll be rejoicing with music, cake, poetry, friends, readings, and assorted literary shenanigans. Everyone is welcome for what is sure to be a wonderful afternoon.

Dr. Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth is an acclaimed poet, translator, educator, and editor. He was born in Mexico City in 1926, the son of an army officer of Spanish descent and a musician mother of German descent. In 1940 he left Mexico for Texas, making the United States his permanent home. He received a B.A. from the University of Texas in 1950 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1973, and is professor emeritus of Spanish at The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for more than thirty years. He has written numerous critical studies and has been published extensively in anthologies and magazines. He is the author of the poetry collections Looking for the Horse Latitudes (Host Publications) and Between Day and Night: New and Selected Poems, 1946-2010 (Tamu Press), and the translator of Natural Selection (Host Publications), the collected works of Uruguayan poet Enrique Fierro.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless poetic universe!

Held on the fourth Tuesday of every month and hosted by François Pointeau, Malvern’s Multi-Verse will feature readings from guest poets, plus a Q & A session. Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month’s Malvern’s Multi-Verse features young writers from the Barrio Writers Creative Writing Program. We will have an interview with Austin Barrio Writers leaders Leticia Urieta and Marilyse Figueroa followed by poetry from some of the young writers and a panel discussion with the poets about the Barrio Writers program.

Barrio Writers (BW) is a creative writing program founded by author Sarah Rafael García, which provides free college level writing workshops to teenagers in underserved communities.

Join us in celebrating International Translation Day with a reading featuring renowned translators Kurt Heinzelman, Liliana Valenzuela, and Jamey Gambrell. And we’re also offering 20% off all books in translation on International Translation Day!

Poet, scholar, translator, and editor, Kurt Heinzelman is Editor-at-Large of Bat City Review and former Director of Creative Writing at the University of Texas. His latest book of poetry is Intimacies & Other Devices, and he is the translator of Jean Follain’s 1953 collection Territoires under the title Demarcations (Host Publications). He is also a member of the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature in Istanbul and Honorary Professor at Swansea University (Wales).

Liliana Valenzuela is an award-winning literary translator, poet, essayist, and journalist. Her bilingual poetry chapbook Codex of Journeys: Bendito camino was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2012. Valenzuela is the acclaimed Spanish language translator of works by Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Nina Marie Martínez, Ana Castillo, Dagoberto Gilb, Richard Rodríguez, Rudolfo Anaya, Cristina García, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many other writers. Her translation of Sandra Cisneros’ A House of My Own is due out Fall 2016. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and an inaugural fellow of CantoMundo, she works for ¡Ahora Sí!, the Spanish weekly of the Austin American-Statesman.

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. She has translated works by Marina Tsvetaeva and Tatyana Tolstaya, in addition to Vladimir Sorokin’s three-volume Ice trilogy and his Day of the  Oprichnik and, most recently, The Blizzard. This spring, the one-man show “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” premiered, featuring her translated surtitles of Joseph Brodsky’s poetry. Also this spring, Gambrell was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, which recognizes “a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.”

Join us in celebrating the launch of James Dennis’ poetry collection, Correspondence in D Minor, with a reading from James Dennis and Kirk Wilson.

Correspondence in D Minor is a new collection of poems, many (although not all) of which are written as fictional letters to or from figures from literature, history and scripture. Many of the poems draw upon well established poetry forms. All copies of the limited first edition are numbered, signed and the cover is letter-pressed.

James R. Dennis is a novelist, a poet, and a Dominican friar. Along with two friends, he is a co-author of the Miles Arceneaux mystery series. He also writes and teaches on spiritual matters. He was born in West Texas, and lives in San Antonio with his two ill-behaved dogs. More information about James and the book is available on his website.

A chapbook of Kirk Wilson’s poems, The Early Word, was published by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop at Burning Deck press. His recent work has appeared in Confrontation, Eclipse, Folly, Meridian, Midway Journal, The New Guard Literary Review (Finalist, Machigonne Fiction Contest), River Teeth (Pushcart nomination), Soundings East, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and The Wordstock 10 anthology (selected by Aimee Bender). Kirk’s true crime classic Unsolved, an investigation into ten high profile murders, has been published in six editions in the US and UK.

Opening day seems like it was only yesterday, but in fact Malvern Books turns THREE this week. And we’re celebrating our third anniversary in fine style, with music, readings, and cake. Come on down and join the party!

 * Also worth noting: there will be 25 % off everything in the store all day! *

At 5pm, you’re invited to join us for a communal reading of the entirety of Frank O’Hara’s 1964 Lunch Poems. Come read a verse or two, and enjoy some birthday cake as your reward.

At 6pm, we’ll serve up some tasty snacks. Come eat and be merry!

And at 7pm, we’ll tap our feet to live music from ComeDrumForFun… and eat more cake!

Join us for a reading with Texas State MFA faculty. Featuring Doug Dorst, Jennifer duBois, Steve Wilson, and Roger Jones.

Doug Dorst is the author of two novels, S. (with J.J. Abrams) and Alive in Necropolis, a story collection, The Surf Guru. He has also collaborated on a play, Monster in the Dark (with foolsFURY Theater), and is a staff writer on the TV show Z: The Beginning of Everything (airing February 2017). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and a recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Austin and has taught at Texas State since 2011.

Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award fiction and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stanford University Stegner Fellow, duBois is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

Recent poems by Steve Wilson are out or forthcoming in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands, Bluestem, Commonweal, Poem, Georgetown Review, North American Review, America, The Christian Science Monitor, Blue Unicorn, New Orleans Review, San Pedro River Review, The Christian Century, New American Writing, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Midwest Quarterly, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and New Letters; as well as in a number of anthologies, including O Taste and See: Food Poems (Bottom Dog Press), Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by Robert Frost (University of Iowa), Stories from Where We Live: The Gulf Coast (Milkweed Editions), Like Thunder:  Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa), What Have You Lost? (Greenwillow), American Diaspora:  Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa), An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press), Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems (Equinox), Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets (Mutabilis) and Going Down Grand: Poetry of the Grand Canyon (Lithic).  His books include Allegory Dance, The Singapore Express, and The Lost Seventh.

Roger Jones earned a BA and MA at Sam Houston State University and a PhD from Oklahoma State University. He has taught at Texas State University since 1987 (when it was still Southwest Texas State University). He has published two full collections of poems and two chapbooks, with a third chapbook to be published in coming months. His poems have appeared for the last three decades in journals that include Cortland Review, Modern Haiku, Connotation Press, Evansville Review, Texas Observer, Poet Lore, Baltimore Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Arkansas Review. He’s been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, and was poetry editor of the Texas Review from 2009-2012.

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Fear of Being Swallowed.” Why wait until Halloween? Start celebrating this Sunday with some haunting spoken word and storytelling by The Austin Writers Roulette! Feel free to wear a costume. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! This month we have something rather special: a SciFi/Fantasy/Speculative fiction-themed reading with two very talented writers! We’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles and invite questions from the audience.

Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month Emily McKay will share her vampire series, The Farm, a trilogy set in a terrifying post-apocalyptic world where teens are farmed as food and genetically mutated monsters roam the country. And Carl Vick will read from his new book, The Epic of Ur, the story of an immortal man set in a time before recorded history.

Emily McKay is a four time Rita nominee. She’s published twenty-five books with Harlequin, Berkley, Walker Books and Entangled. In 2013, she won the Rita award for Best Young Adult Romance. She is a life-long fan of books, pop-culture, and anything geeky. She has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and baking cookies. When she’s not kicking-ass and scooping cookie dough, she’s watching videos on YouTube. Though her interests may appear broad, the common denominators are swoony heroes and snarky humor. She lives in central Texas with her husband, kids, two mildly-psychotic dogs, two nervous cats and nineteen chickens.

Whether writing music or novels, Carl Vick has always sought different ways of being creative. Although he has written extensively on topics in Philosophy, he began writing his first novel, The Epic of Ur, at twenty-one while still attending school for a Philosophy degree. Carl has found inspiration during his stints living abroad in Chile and Spain. He currently resides in Austin, Texas, where he continues to write captivating works of fiction.

Join us for a reading celebrating the launch of Short Stories by Texas Authors Vol. 2.

Texas Authors have once again allowed their creative minds to open up and expand the Universe in which they live with short stories that captures one’s emotions through the everlasting aspect of storytelling.

In this, the second volume of award-winning short stories, the reader is taken on a personal ride of growth and understanding, then through history both factual and fictional as they explore each side of two wars. Then fear grabs hold of you and shakes you with terror before unleashing giggles and out-right laughs. Those are just a few of the emotions one will experience as they read these seventeen short stories from all parts of Texas.

Here are the winners from this year’s contest:

Join us in celebrating the launch of L.E. Kinzie’s first poetry collection, Ignite. With readings from L.E. and Robin Bradford.

“Kinzie walks the fine line between modern American life and spirituality like a tightrope walker in heels. Her voice is funny, blunt, and sublime.”
—Joe McDermott, internationally awarded songwriter and performer

Ignite celebrates the beauty and sacredness of American life. Kirkus Reviews says Ignite is “a compilation of verse that’s popular in the best sense of the word.”

L.E. Kinzie lives in Austin, Texas, with a ridiculous and ever-changing menagerie of pets and her family. A recovering ex-lawyer, she is a passionate observer of humanity and the common threads that bind us all together—beauty, creation, and creating art.

Robin Bradford is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Mudfish Review and the Texas Poetry Calendar and is forthcoming in The Texas Observer and Friends Journal: A Quaker Magazine. Her literary honors include the Dobie Paisano Fellowship for Texas Writers, O. Henry Award, Texas Literature Grant and a Community Sabbatical Grant from the University of Texas Humanities Institute. A Zen lay teacher, Bradford works as communications director at Austin Community Foundation.

Join us for a poetry reading from the late Max Ritvo’s first collection, Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions). Max’s poetry will be read by Sarah Matthes.

When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures.

Ritvo writes to his wife, ex­-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.

Sarah Matthes is a poet, performer, and tall ship sailor from New Jersey. Her work can be found in Prodigal, the Feminist Utopia Project, the Bad Version, and His Majesty the Baby’s online zine. A graduate of Yale, she was a Frederick Mortimer Clapp Poetry fellow in 2013, and is a current fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Joe Doerr’s third book, Tocayo: New & Selected Poems & Songs (Shearsman Books). With a reading from Joe, and a performance of the song lyrics from the book from Joe and his band Churchwood.

“By turns erudite and lyrical, esoteric and oracular, profane and ethereal—Joe Doerr’s Tocayo contains multitudes. This vast miscellany, a bravura poetic performance by every measure, signals the aborning of a new, necessary literary idiom for this mashed-up American age: the ineluctable punk sublime.” —John Phillip Santos

“Disturbs all the codes.” —John Kinsella

Joe Doerr is a poet, musician, and essayist whose first collection, Order of the Ordinary, was published by Salt in 2003. His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in numerous journals including Fifth Wednesday, Notre Dame Review, PN Review, and Stand. Doerr is also the singer and lyricist for the acclaimed dystopic blues band, Churchwood, and Adjunct Professor of English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife Mary.

Churchwood is an avant-blues quintet from Austin, Texas known for its poetry-driven lyrics, high-energy performances, and eccentric approach to making blues-based rock and roll.

Join us for an afternoon with John Domini, Lowell Mick White, and Alysa Hayes. Domini will read from his recent short story collection, MOVIEOLA! (Dzanc Books); White will read fiction from Inside Outside Upside Down (Buffalo Times Press, forthcoming); and Hayes will read poetry from her forthcoming collection.

John Domini (below center) has earned rare praise for his new set of short stories, MOVIEOLA! Critics are calling it “the smartest kind of fun,” “feverishly exuberant,” and “a glory.” The book offers a romp through the cineplex of the moviemaker’s mind, in which the usual heroes, the superman or the assassin or the sports star, are trotted out for various dry runs. Thus we may recognize the narrative outlines, but we’ve never seen them so twisted. Is this storytelling, or its opposite? Come see if you can find out, as Domini reads from his book and then takes questions. The discussion will also touch on his wide range of other publications—novels, journalism, criticism, and poetry—and on his teaching, at Harvard, Northwestern, and elsewhere.

Lowell Mick White (below left) is the author of three books: Professed and That Demon Life, novels, and Long Time Ago Good, a story collection. Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award and a Dobie-Paisano Fellow, White teaches at Texas A&M University.

An administrator at an Austin software company, Alysa Hayes’s (below right) poetry has appeared in Callaloo and Big Tex[t].

Join us in celebrating the launch of E. Kristin Anderson’s new chapbook, We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). With readings from E. Kristin, K.D. Lovgren, and Abe Louise Young.

We’re Doing Witchcraft is a collection of feminist poetry about adolescence, the female body, the female experience, poems of protest and poems of selkies. The title poem is about school dress codes and how shoulders and knees obviously bewitch male students…

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and author living in Austin, Texas. She is the co-editor of Dear Teen Me, an anthology based on the popular website and her next anthology, Hysteria: Writing the female body, is forthcoming from Sable Books. She is currently curating Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture for ELJ Publications. Kristin is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), She Witnesses (dancing girl press), and We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). Kristin recently took a position as Special Projects Manager for ELJ and is a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker.

K.D. Lovgren is the author of novels Photographic and Sea Change and the novella Book of Light and Shadows. Photographic has been a bestseller in Suspense on Amazon Canada. Both novels are Awesome Indies Approved, awarded a place on the list of quality independent fiction. Her poetry manuscript, The Archeology of Us, is under submission. Lovgren is the recipient of a Brown Foundation Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center and a graduate of the oldest women’s college in the U.S., Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Lovgren resides in Austin, Texas.

Abe Louise Young is an independent writer, educator and social justice activist. Her work has won a Grolier Poetry Prize, the Hawai’i Review’s Nell Altizer Award, a Narrative Magazine Story Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing is forthcoming or has appeared in The Nation, WITNESS, New Letters, Feminist Wire and many other journals. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Heaven to Me (Headmistress Press) and Ammonite (Magnolia Press Collective). A lifelong social justice advocate, she’s also the author/editor of numerous guides, including Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your LGBTQ Students; Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision from American Teenagers; and an archive of oral histories with Hurricane Katrina survivors, Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History Project. Young earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James Michener Fellow, and holds a BA from Smith College.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless poetic universe!

Held on the fourth Tuesday of every month and hosted by François Pointeau, Malvern’s Multi-Verse will feature readings from guest poets, plus a Q & A session. Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month’s Malvern’s Multi-Verse features readings and discussion from ire’ne lara silva and Alan Altimont.

ire’ne lara silva is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013), which won the Premio Aztlan. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors for the forthcoming collection of poetry and essays, Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzalduan Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books, 2017). ire’ne is the recipient of the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldua Milagro Award. ire’ne was recently named a 2016-2018 Texas Touring Roster Artist.

Alan Altimont has been translating the largely neglected Latin poetry of Marbod of Rennes (1035-1123 CE), the only early medieval European to write poems about himself, his sexuality, aesthetic experience, and the writing of poetry. He is an associate professor of English at St. Edward’s University, where he has taught various literature, creative writing, and composition courses for more than thirty years.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Bryce Milligan’s Take to the Highway: Arabesques for Travelers, a collection of poems and prose poems. With readings from Bryce Milligan and W. Joe Hoppe, and music from Bryce.

“Bryce Milligan’s Take to the Highway is a book of big heart, big mind, and a big eight-cylinder engine, bringing poems—especially the stretched out prose poems—of distinction and evocative power.” —Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty and Ten Windows

“Take to the Highway is indeed about highways, but more crucially it’s about journeys, and about the intricate memory map of human consciousness. It’s a great pleasure to follow Bryce Milligan along side roads, detours, switchbacks, and eerily beckoning paths; and to encounter at the end a design, a destination, a questing mind at peace.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo

Bryce Milligan is an author working in numerous genres, from children’s books to novels for young adults, to adult poetry and criticism. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN American Center, and the Texas Institute of Letters, his reviews and essays have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, et al. The founding editor of Pax: A Journal for Peace through Culture (1983-1987) and (with Roberto Bonazzi) Vortex: A Critical Review (1986-1990), he directed the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s literature program and its San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair and Latina Letters conferences for several years. Milligan has been the publisher, editor and book designer of Wings Press since 1995. Milligan was the primary editor of Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (Riverhead, 1995), which was the first all-Latina anthology to be published by a major American publishing house. He is the author of four historical novels and short story collections for young adults. He is also the author of six previous collections of poetry. His poetry and his song lyrics have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Southwest Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Clover, and Texas Observer, among others. Once upon a time, he was a working luthier and a singer/songwriter (twice a semi-finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folks songwriting competition). He has taught English and creative writing at every level, including workshops from California to Prague. Milligan is a recipient of the Gemini Ink “Award for Literary Excellence” and the St. Mary’s University President’s Peace Commission’s “Art of Peace Award” for “creating work that enhances human understanding through the arts.”

W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. Joe’s one-of-a-kind poetry video, “$5200 MSTA,” has been shown at the Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland. His books include a collection of short stories, Harmon Place (1991) from Primal Press, a poetry collection, Galvanized (2007), from Dalton Publishing, and a second poetry collection, Diamond Plate (2012), from Obsolete Press. Hoppe is the Poet Lariat of Austin’s intellectual variety show The Dionysium. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. He is currently finishing up a four-year effort to get a customized ’51 Plymouth Cranbrook roadworthy for a trip down Route 66 in the summer of 2017. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha, and featuring young women writers from the Austin community (and beyond!). This month’s readers are Darri Farr and Sam Miller.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic! Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~8pm – Let the reading begin!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Joseph Somoza’s poetry collection, As Far As I Know (Cinco Puntos). With readings from Joseph Somoza, Ash Smith, and Kyle Schlesinger.

As Far As I Know is a beautiful book. A wise book. For Joseph Somoza, language, and the world around, is like a river, forever changing and flowing toward the sea, going this way and that, according to the geography. He allows the poem to follow along, he says, “to build itself, allow(s) words to call up other words through aural and memory associations and syntactic demands, and see where it will lead.” The seasons change, his mother dies, his wife Jill and he share coffee and make love, and crows begin to populate his city. Somoza transforms this stuff of life into a wonderful music of poetry. It’s a poetry of intimacy and celebration of being human.

Joseph Somoza was born in Asturias, Spain in 1940, and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey; and Chicago. After studying pre-med and English and teaching college in Texas and Puerto Rico, he received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa in 1973 and moved to New Mexico the same year. He taught creative writing and literature at New Mexico State University for twenty-two years, and was poetry editor of Puerto del Sol and a founder and poetry editor of Sin Fronteras Journal. He has published five pamphlets and five full books of poetry, most recently, As Far As I Know (Cinco Puntos Press), and he has an online chapbook (Broadside #38, with paintings by Jill Somoza). He has done readings of his poetry in venues throughout the United States and in Mexico, and has had poems in over 200 hard-copy and on-line magazines, journals, and anthologies. He took early retirement from teaching and editing to have more time for writing mornings in his back yard and taking part in the poetry community in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he lives with wife Jill, a painter. They have three children and six grandchildren.

Ash Smith (Keyfitz) is the author of the chapbooks Water Shed, Come Such Frequency, Pigeon of Tears, and most recently Park of Unwired Asking. She lives in Austin where she works as a web designer for the government.

Kyle Schlesinger is a poet living in Austin, Texas. Recent books of poetry include: Sydney Omarr’s Wild Children, with the artist Flynn Maria Bergann (Planned Obsolescence Press, 2016); Far & Away (Textile Series, 2016); Keep the Change, with Deborah Poe (Great Fainting Spells, 2015); and Parts of Speech (Chax Press, 2014). Scholarly works include Poetry & Typography (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2016) and Threads Talks, with Steve Clay (Cuneiform/Granary Books, 2016). He is proprietor of Cuneiform Press, a nonprofit literary organization specializing in poetry, typography, artists’ books, and music, and the Director of the Graduate School of Publishing at the University of Houston.

Join us for a reading and book signing from members of the Heart of Texas chapter of the Sisters in Crime organization. Featuring Alexandra Burt, N.M. Cedeño, V.P. Chandler, Helen Currie Foster, K.P. Gresham, Laura Oles, Eugenia Parish, Kathy Waller, George Wier, and Manning Wolfe.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

For this special Halloween Edition, ghost stories, costumes, and candy to share are encouraged! Plus, we’ll be announcing the winners of this year’s Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Please join us at Malvern Books for Fantastical Fictions, an odd-monthly event focusing on the literary fantastic across genres and cultures hosted by Rebecca Schwarz and Chris Brown. We bring together writers and readers of fantastic literature in Austin by featuring published writers reading from new works and from examples of fantastic literature available on our shelves. Discussion and Q&A sessions will follow the readings.

This month’s guest is acclaimed speculative fiction writer Robert Jackson Bennett.

Robert Jackson Bennett is a two-time award winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, an Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original, and is also the 2010 recipient of the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer, and a Philip K Dick Award Citation of Excellence. City of Stairs was shortlisted for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. His sixth novel, City of Blades, is in stores now.

Please email us to sign up for our Fantastical Fictions email list if you’d like to receive news about our upcoming fantastic literature events, as well as announcements about new works of fantastic literature in the store.

Join us for an evening with writer R.S. Dabney, who will be reading from her first novel, The Soul Mender, book one in The Soul Mender Trilogy.

Judging by the engrossing first volume, this trilogy about two heroines’ perilous mission has the potential to be not only highly entertaining, but profoundly edifying as well. —Kirkus Reviews

Debut author R.S. Dabney’s passion for reading, writing, and exploring thrilling stories about unlikely heroes conquering evil started at a young age, culminating in the completion of her first novel, The Soul Mender. Her favorite books span every genre and she likes to describe her own work as having something for everyone—a sprinkle of suspense, a dash of adventure, and a whole lot of good versus evil.

R.S. grew up running around the red rocks and ravines in the deserts of southern Utah, building forts, fighting battles, and living the lives of all the characters she and her friends created. An avid lover of all things nature and the outdoors, R.S. attended Texas A&M University where she majored in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation and minored in Park and Natural Resource Management. She worked for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for three years before leaving to pursue her dream of writing a novel.

She currently lives in the Big Bend region of Texas with her husband, two dogs, and cat. When she isn’t lost in another dimension creating havoc for her characters and stories, she enjoys mountain biking, exploring the desert, and eating way too much Mexican food.

Join us in celebrating the Austin launch of John Jodzio’s latest short story collection, Knockout. With readings from John, Kendra Fortmeyer, and Tatiana Ryckman.

Knockout is full of flawless portraits of the deeply flawed. A recovering drug addict gets tricked into stealing a tiger. A man buys a used sex chair from his neighbor. A woman suffering from agoraphobia raises her son completely indoors. Jodzio wonderfully steers these stories into deeper places, creating a brilliant examination of those on the fringes of modern life.

The absurd, darkly humorous Americana of Knockout shows Jodzio at his imaginative best.” —J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft McKnight Fellowship. His stories have appeared in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney’s, and One Story. He’s the author of three short story collections—the recently released Knockout (Soft Skull Press, 2016) as well as If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home and Get In If You Want To Live.

Kendra Fortmeyer likes to play in the genre divide. A Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Nonrequired Reading, One Story, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, Lightspeed and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from the New Writers Project at UT Austin, and recently attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ workshop in San Diego. Her debut magical realist YA novel, Hole in the Middle, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2017.

Tatiana Ryckman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of the chapbook story collection, Twenty-Something; managing editor of the Austin Review; and assistant editor at sunnyoutside press.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: two published authors will read from their work and there’ll be an audience Q & A. We’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles and invite questions from the audience.

Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night features two men of mystery! Ashish Malpani will read from Ten Days in October, a murder mystery set in a small town in rural India, and Michael Noll will read from his story that appeared in the latest Best American Mystery Stories.

Ashish Malpani is an Indian-American freelancer and blogger. Born in Sangamner, a small town in rural India, he spent much of his adult life in Austin, Texas. A technology product marketer by trade, Ashish earned his MSE from Purdue University and MBA from the University of Texas. Ashish fell in love with reading and traveling at a young age. As a kid he had two dreams in life: to write a novel and to travel around the world. Thirty eight countries and counting, Ashish has explored various cultures and captured the world through the lens of his camera with his wife Samta and son Ayan.

Michael Noll is the Program Director for the Writers’ League of Texas and editor of the craft-of-writing blog Read to Write Stories. His book, In the Beginning, Middle, and End: A Field Guide to Writing Fiction, will be published by A Strange Object in 2017. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Chattahoochee Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Indiana Review, and The New Territory. His story, “The Tank Yard,” is included in Best American Mystery Stories 2016.

Join us for an evening with writer and artist Eduardo Lalo, who will be reading from and signing his recent publications, Intemperie and Simone. Host César A. Salgado will also talk with Lalo about his books and the translation of his work into English. Please note that parts of this event will be conducted in Spanish.

An award-winning Puerto Rican writer, essayist, photographer, and visual artist, Eduardo Lalo is known for cross-genre books that express his passion for both words and images. Among his titles are La Isla Silente (2002), Los Pies De San Juan (2002), La Inutilidad (2004), Donde (2005), Los Países Invisibles (2008), El Deseo Del Lápiz (2010), Necrópolis (2014), and Intemperie (2016). In 2013 he won the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for Simone (2011), now available in English from The University of Chicago Press. His visual work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. LLILAS Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin for Fall 2016, Lalo is currently teaching the graduate seminar Caribbean Poetics. Known for razor sharp columns in the island’s press, Lalo is today among the most outspoken and resolute critics of recurring colonialism in Puerto Rico and the world. 

Join us for a reading with poets George Drew, Wendy Barker, and Barbara Ras.

George Drew was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New York State, where he currently lives. He is the author of seven collections, most recently Pastoral Habits: New & Selected Poems (2016), Down & Dirty (2015) and The View from Jackass Hill (2011, winner of the 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize), all published by Texas Review Press. His eighth collection, Fancy’s Orphan, will be published in 2017 by Tiger Bark Press. George has published widely, with poems, reviews, and essays appearing in journals around the country. His work has also been anthologized, most recently in The Southern Poetry Anthology, II: Mississippi (Texas Review Press, 2010), Down to the Dark River: An Anthology of Poems About the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015), and The Great American Wise Ass Anthology (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016). George has won several awards, most recently the St. Petersburg Review poetry contest, and in 2010 his collection, American Cool, won that year’s Adirondack Literary Award for best poetry book of 2009. Pastoral Habits has been nominated by Texas Review Press for the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize.

Wendy Barker’s sixth collection of poetry, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press, 2015). Her fourth chapbook is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press, 2015). An anthology of poems about the 1960s, Far Out: Poems of the ’60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016. Other books include a selection of poems with accompanying essays, Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002), and a selection of translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (co-translated with Saranindranath Tagore, Braziller, 2001). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013.  She is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), as well as co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships, she serves as poetry editor of Persimmon Tree: An Online Journal of the Arts for Women Over Sixty. She is the Pearl LeWinn Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982.

Barbara Ras is the author of three poetry collections: Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award and was also awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; One Hidden Stuff; and The Last Skin, winner of the Award for Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Ras has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.  Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, Five Points, American Scholar, Massachusetts Review, and Orion, as well as in many other magazines and anthologies.  She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Ras lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press.

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Readers include featured poet Carrie Fountain (pictured below), plus Dan Barton, Keith Fields, and Tori Sharpe.

Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review is a literary journal based in Austin, Texas that publishes poetry along with photographs, reviews, and essays.

Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review cover art: At the beach by New York-based artist Eli Slaydon

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Fuzzy Logic.” Featured artists include: HOPE RUIZ, URSULA PIKE, DAVID KENDALL, TERESA Y. ROBERSON and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Valerie Hsiung’s third full-length poetry collection, efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books). Joining Hsiung as co-headlining readers for the evening will be Lisa Olstein, Dalton Day, and Taisia Kitaiskaia.

Valerie Hsiung is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books, 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013), and under your face (O Balthazar Press, 2013). Her writing can be found in many places such as American Letters & Commentary, Cosmonauts Avenue, Denver Quarterly, New Delta Review, PEN Poetry Series, Prelude, RealPoetik, and VOLT, among elsewhere. She currently serves as an editor for Poor Claudia.

Lisa Olstein is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). A new book, Late Empire, is forthcoming in 2017. A winner of the Essay Press Prize, her chapbook, The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to those of Whales is a Family Resemblance was released this fall. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dalton Day is an MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin and the author of two collections of poetry, Actual Cloud and Exit, Pursued, as well as several chapbooks, including To Breathe I’m Too Thin. His poems have been featured in Hobart, PANK, Everyday Genius, and Shabby Doll House, among others. He has a dog named Dot, who is the opposite of the crushing emotional weight that comes with being alive.

Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of Literary Witches, a collaboration with illustrator Katy Horan (Seal Press 2017). She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Fence.

Join us for a reading from faculty members of Austin Community College’s Creative Writing program. With readings from W. Joe Hoppe, Irwin Tang, Vivé Griffith, Dunya Bean, and John Herndon (left to right, below).

W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. Joe’s one-of-a-kind poetry video, “$5200 MSTA,” has been shown at the Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland. His books include a collection of short stories, Harmon Place (1991) from Primal Press, a poetry collection, Galvanized (2007), from Dalton Publishing, and a second poetry collection, Diamond Plate (2012), from Obsolete Press. Hoppe is the Poet Lariat of Austin’s intellectual variety show The Dionysium. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. He is currently finishing up a four-year effort to get a customized ’51 Plymouth Cranbrook roadworthy for a trip down Route 66 in the summer of 2017. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.

Irwin Tang is a writer and activist. He is the principal author of Asian Texans: Our Histories and Our Lives and co-author of When Invisible Children Sing: a true story of five street children, an idealistic young doctor, and their dangerous hope. He is currently working on a documentary about how the goats are trouncing the sheep in Jesus’s war on hunger.

Vivé Griffith is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in The Sun, Oxford American, Gettysburg Review, and the Washington Post. She moved to Austin in 1999 and is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. Since 2007 she has directed Free Minds, a program offering free college humanities classes to adults who have faced barriers to education. She teaches poetry workshops in the community to anyone who asks.

Currently an adjunct professor of creative writing at Austin Community College, Dunya Bean received the master of fine arts from The University of Texas at El Paso—on the border, la frontera—between Texas and Mexico. Her thesis and novel about two sisters divided by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution got a second place and a trip to receive the Robie McCauley Prize at Castle Weil in the Netherlands. A stint as a writer-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation’s Clearmont, Wyoming location led to her current novel, Preacher Man, using Walter Prescott Webb’s book The Great Plains that divides the country at the 38^th meridian and In Preacher Man, how morality plays out during drought, sin among ranchers, farmers and others in West Texas. Short stories have landed in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals; and Bean’s short video, “Looking for the Light, Listening for the Sound,” showed at SXSW in March, 2012. 

John Herndon is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. He has published seven books of poetry, and his first novel, One Too Many, was published in 2016. His first feature film as writer and producer, Frame Switch, is currently available on Amazon, and his screenplay has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay for a Feature Film at international film festivals in Berlin and Milan. He teaches writing and literature at Austin Community College.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of Dos Gatos Press’ most recent anthology, Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, edited by Scott Wiggerman and Cindy Huyser with a foreword by Dr. Carmen Tafolla. With readings from Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser, Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta, Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell, Barbara Randals Gregg, and Scott Wiggerman.

This reading will feature poets from Austin and across the state reading their own work and others’ from this acclaimed anthology. The second in a series of anthologies of poetry of the Southwest by Albuquerque-based Dos Gatos Press, Bearing the Mask presents a diverse collection of personae from before European contact to the present, from the historical to the mythical, and from the famous to the obscure, woven together to form a vibrant, complex history.

About Bearing the Mask:

To quote from the foreword by Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla, “The range of voices here is as beautiful and translucent as a rainbow. From Cochise to Calamity Jane, Navaho Code Talkers to Japanese internees, Devil Girl and Old Man Gloom, slaves and stunt pilots, Paiutes and migrant mothers, Annie Oakley and Georgia O’Keeffe, security officers and French tourists, Gregorio Cortez, La Llorona, and Cynthia Ann Parker—all come to life here, speak their own truths and their own sacred space in these poems.”

Bearing the Mask offers rich perspectives on life in the Southwest, garnering praise in reader reviews that call it “fascinating” and “an amazing book for poetry and history lovers.”

Photo, L-R: Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser

Anjela Villarreal Ratliff’s poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga; The Enigmatist; Blue Hole; Texas Poetry Calendar; di-vêrsé-city; Australian Latino Press; Boundless 2016; Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems; Ribbons Anthology; and forthcoming in Chachalaca Review; Pilgrimage Magazine; and The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop. Anjela is also a writing workshop presenter for youth and adults. A native Tejana, she was raised in southern California, but has resided in Austin since 1990.

C. Samuel Rees is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland’s writing program. He has been published in Fairy Tale Review, JMWW, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and in the Texas Poetry Calendar. He lives in Austin, Texas where he writes poetry, fiction, and works as a high school teacher.

Charlotte Renk‘s poetry has appeared in journals such as Kalliope, Concho River Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Southwest Review, and Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, as well as in anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas, and Her Texas. She has also published three books of poetry— These Holy Hungers: Secret Yearnings from an Empty Cup, Solidago: An Altar to Weeds, and The Tenderest Petal Hears (co-winner, 2014 Blue Horse Press Chapbook Award).

Christa Pandey has been widely published since she moved to Austin. As German immigrant herself she became interested in the immigration saga of the 19th century. Her poems are collected in three chapbooks (Southern Seasons, Maya, and Hummingbird Wings), while individual poems can be found in the Texas Poetry Calendar, the Poetry@Round Top Anthology, Naugatuck River Review and online at Silver Birch Press.

Cindy Huyser has worked with Dos Gatos Press as an editor since 2008. Her chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was named co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook contest. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, The Nassau Review, Untameable City, and the Texas Poetry Calendar, which she co-edited from 2009 – 2014.

Photo, L-R: Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta

Cyra S. Dumitru is a teacher of poetry writing, writing as healing and of college composition, and is certified in Poetic Medicine through The Institute of Poetic Medicine. She facilitates individual and small group healing through writing circles in a variety of community settings. She has three book-length collections of her poems: What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, and remains.

Gloria Amescua, a CantoMundo fellow and Hedgebrook alumna, is the author of two chapbooks, Windchimes and What Remains. Amescua has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including di-verse-city, Kweli Journal, the Texas Poetry Calendar, The Acentos Review, Toe Good Poetry, Pilgrimage Magazine, and Elsewhere Lit. She has also received the Austin Poetry Society Award and the Christina Sergeyenvna Award.

Gordon Magill is a journalist, writing teacher, exhibit writer, freelancer, and poet. He has worked at The Washington Evening Star and Washington Post in Washington DC, taught writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, as well as in public high school, and has written about two hundred published articles and short stories. Recently Gordon’s poetry has been published in The Enigmatist and Blue Hole.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s recent poems appear in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets, Lifting the Sky, Texas Poetry Calendar, and in her chapbook Water Signs. Katherine co-directs the Poetry at Round Top festival, is a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and professor and chair of English at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, TX.

Leticia Urieta is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and a fiction candidate in the MFA program at Texas State University, where she is a graduate teaching assistant and the blog editor for Front Porch Journal. She is currently working as an educator in the community with a focus on equity in the pedagogy of writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, St. Sucia Zine and BorderSenses. Leticia lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two dogs. She is currently at work on a short story collection and her first novel about the role of Mexican soldaderas in Texas’ war with Mexico.

Photo, L-R: Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell

Lucy Griffith is a poet and essayist who lives on a ranch along the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. She is a Certified Master Naturalist as well as a licensed psychologist.
She is a member of the Texas Writer’s League and has been published monthly in The Texas Star and various psychology journals. Her muse is a tractor named Ruby and a good day is one spent outside.

Lyman Grant teaches creative writing, English, and humanities at Austin Community College. He is married and the proud father of three sons. A poet since high school, he has a big pile of poems, some of them collected in four books and one chapbook. The most recent is Last Work: A Meditation on the Final Paintings of Neal Adams.

Lynn Reynolds wrote many poems while a member of the Houston Poetry Society, the Texas Poetry Society and Poets, Ink. She read at the 2012 Houston Poetry Fest and has now been published in From Hide and Horn: A Sesquicentennial Anthology of Texas Poets, the Texas Poetry Calendar, and Untameable City.

Sandi Stromberg was guest editor of Mutabilis Press’ latest poetry anthology, Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, and Colere, among others, as well as in the anthologies TimeSlice, The Weight of Addition, and Improbable Worlds, Crossing Lines, Goodbye, Mexico, Civilized Beasts, and is upcoming in Texas Weather Anthology. She has been a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eight times.

Vanessa Zimmer-Powell was the winner of a Rick Steves Haiku Award, and was a poetry award winner at the 2013 Austin International Poetry Fest. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Weekly Avocet, Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, Untameable City, the Texas Poetry Calendar, San Pedro River Review, The Chaffey Review, and Copperfield Review.

Photo, L-R: Barbara Randals Gregg, Scott Wiggerman

Barbara Randals Gregg has poetry in di-verse-city, The Enigmatist, Blue Hole, the Austin Poetry Society’s Best Austin Poetry anthology, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga, and several editions of Texas Poetry Calendar. She currently serves as Austin Poetry Society President.

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and an editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky, Wingbeats II, and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems. Recent poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Red Earth Review, Pinyon Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the anthologies This Assignment Is So Gay, Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer’s, and The Great Gatsby Anthology. He is an editor for Dos Gatos Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

We’re delighted to be hosting a reading to celebrate the launch of Small Packages, the debut anthology of stories, poetry and prose from Austin’s Writers Workshop. Readers include poets Kara Bell, Laurie Cosbey and A.M. Lewin, novelist Ron Seybold, plus Holly Lorka, Karen Hoffman, Merry Klonower, Hadley Hill, and Emily Weaver.

Join us for a celebration hosted by Pterodáctilo, the bilingual journal and blog run by graduate students in UT Austin’s department of Spanish and Portuguese. This bilingual event will feature poetry readings… and tamales!

Join us in celebrating the launch of the Vision + Voice Anthology. Featuring readings by winning and honorable-mention poets, a poster exhibit, and refreshments!

Vision + Voice is a collaboration between Austin Community College and Austin Independent School District that promotes literacy and creative expression by combining artwork from ACC students with poetry from AISD students.

Join us in celebrating the release of the Fall 2016 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review. Students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork with us. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Department.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their work and there’ll be an audience Q & A. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night has a SciFi/Fantasy/Speculative twist, and features a trifecta of talented writers: Amanda Downum, Marshall Ryan Maresca, and Yasser Bahjatt (left to right, below).

Amanda Downum is the author of the Necromancer Chronicles—The Drowning City, The Bone Palace, and Kingdoms of Dust—published by Orbit Books, and Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, from Solaris. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, TX. Her day job sometimes involves dressing up as a giant worm.

Marshall Ryan Maresca is a fantasy and science-fiction writer, as well as a playwright, living in South Austin with his wife and son. He is the author of the Maradaine Novels: The Thorn of Dentonhill, A Murder of Mages, The Alchemy of Chaos, An Import of Intrigue and the upcoming Holver Alley Crew. His work also appeared in the Norton Hint Fiction anthology and Rick Klaw’s anthology Rayguns Over Texas. He has also had several short plays produced.

Yasser Bahjatt is a US-born author, translator, software developer, entrepreneur, and co founder of Yatakhayaloon: The League of Arabic SciFiers, as well as the co-founder of ARIA (Autonomous Roadless Intelligent Array) Logistics. He holds a BA in Computer Engineering, completed Cambridge University’s MOSAIC leadership and management program in the United Kingdom, and was the first Saudi graduate of Singularity University (SU) in Silicon Valley, CA, where he founded Matternet, a project which aims to alleviate poverty and accelerate growth through roadless transportation networks. Bahjatt manages business development at Quad Dimensions Tech, owns and manages E2T (the leading eSports company of Saudi Arabia) and data networking provider Intelligent Networks’ Components (INC, Saudi Arabia’s first local internet gaming service), and promotes innovations in eSports by serving as president of the Electronic Sports International Federation (eSIF). Bahjatt was the first to translate TED talks into Arabic; he translates for TED conferences worldwide. He is the author of Yaqteena: The Old World (2015), the first installment and English translation of his SciFi novel series, which explore an alternate historical timeline in which major historical events left Islamic society untouched. Bahjatt co-authored and translated the Saudi Arabia best-selling novel HWJN.

Rebecca Liu is the recipient of fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers and the Stadler Center for Poetry. Her recent poems can be found in Boston Review, VOLT, Web Conjunctions, The Awl, Phantom Limb and Gulf Coast.

For nineteen years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Dos Gatos Press. This year’s reading will feature poets sharing Texas-related work, including their poems from the 2017 Texas Poetry Calendar (edited by Wade Martin and Allyson Whipple).

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Tangled Webs.” The lineup of web-spinners is BIRDMAN 313, DAVID KENDALL, ARALYN HUGHES, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, & THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. This month is our special annual holiday edition! Ugly sweaters strongly encouraged!

Featuring young women writers from the Austin community, this month’s I Screamers are Aimee Mackovic, Sequoia Maner, Mónica Teresa Ortiz, and Amanda Johnston

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic. Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

Malvern Books will also be having its annual holiday gift card promotion: Get a free $10 gift card with every $50 purchase. They make great stocking stuffers!

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler, featuring readings by Annie Harnett, David Jewell, David Thornberry, Larry Thoren, Mark Smith, and Master of Ceremonies W. Joe Hoppe.

Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe, who will be reading tonight, describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us for this fun and friendly afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s debut poetry collection, Images of Radical Politics (Rescue Press). With readings from Vanessa, Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Ryan Bender Murphy, and Kimberly Lambright.

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb (above left) is the author of Images for Radical Politics (above right), which was the Editor’s Choice in the 2015 Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize contest; and the chapbooks midnight blue (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Weekend Poems (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in TimeOut New York, jubilat, Brooklyn Poets, VIDA Women in Literary Arts, Sixth Finch, Word Riot, The Atlas Review, Big Lucks, among other places. She received her MFA in Poetry from CUNY Brooklyn College and is from and lives in Brooklyn.

Emily Bludworth de Barrios is the author of Splendor, a book of poems from H_NGM_N Books. She’s also published two chapbooks: Women, Money, Children, Ghosts, from Sixth Finch, and Extraordinary Power, from Factory Hollow Press. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Jellyfish, New Delta Review, Sixth Finch, and Tender. Emily was born in Houston and raised in Egypt, the United States, and Venezuela; she currently lives in Houston.

Ryan Bender Murphy‘s chapbook, First Man on Mars, was published by Phantom Books in 2013. His other work has recently been published in Better, The Boiler, Cartridge Lit, Country Music, Deluge, Everyday Genius, and Hobart. He has started a journal called Hardly Doughnuts.

Kimberly Lambright studied critical theory at NYU and creative writing at Eastern Washington University. Her debut poetry collection, Ultra-Cabin, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. She is a MacDowell fellow, and her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, Bone Bouquet, The Boiler, Wicked Alice, Big Bridge, and The Burnside Review. She lives in Austin and is at work on her second book, Doom Glove.

Join us for an evening with poets Micah Bateman, Katy Chrisler, and Paula Cisewski (left to right, below).

Micah Bateman is the author of a chapbook, Polis, from The Catenary Press. He is the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest; The Poet’s Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Faith, Doubt, and Wonder; and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Texas-Austin, where he works as an editor on the online Walt Whitman Archive.

Katy Chrisler received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held residencies with the Land Arts of the American West program and 100 West Corsicana. Recent work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Octopus Magazine, The Volta, LVNG and The Seattle Review. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Paula Cisewski’s third poetry collection, The Threatened Everything, will be released in 2016 through Burnside Review Books. Her other books include Ghost Fargo (selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), and the lyric prose chapbook Misplaced Sinister. She has been awarded fellowships from the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She teaches, both academically and privately, and curates artful literary events in the Twin Cities, sometimes in a tiny fort. 

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Spiritual Renewal.” Our featured artists are: BIRDMAN 313, URSULA PIKE, REBECCA M. RAPHAEL, BRIAN PRIOLEAU, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, DAVID KENDALL, BRIAN GROSZ, & THOM THE WORLD POET. Ring in the New Year with soul-fulfilling spoken word and poetry! 

Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night features Larry Barkley (writing as Martin Barkley) and John Pipkin. Martin Barkley will be reading from his newly released story collection/novella, The Lovesong of Smith Oliver Smith, and John Pipkin will be reading from his recent release, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter.

Martin Barkley’s fiction, poetry and reviews have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Texas Observer, Arcadia Press, Work Literary Magazine, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He lives in Austin, Texas.

John Pipkin’s first novel, Woodsburner, was published to national acclaim by Doubleday in 2009. Woodsburner won the New York Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Massachusetts Center for the Book Novel Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Stephen Turner Prize for First Novel. His new historical novel, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. John was the Dobie Paisano Fellow at UT-Austin for the spring of 2011, and he recently returned from a three-week writing fellowship at the MacDowell Artist’s Colony in New Hampshire. Currently, John is the Writer-in-Residence at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and he also teaches at UT-Austin and in the Low-residency MFA Program at Spalding University in Louisville, KY.

On January 15th poets across the country will gather to voice their fears and concerns about a Trump Presidency. Join us at Malvern Books for the Austin event, organized by Justin Booth in association with the Chicon Street Poets. Nationwide, Poets Protest Against Trump is organized by Alan Kaufman, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Michael Rothernberg, co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets For Change.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians.

This month we’re proud to be welcoming our Veteran Writers as featured guests in this special edition of our Lion & Pirate Open Mic! Join us for this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Join us for a reading from Michael Bunker and Forbes West.

Michael Bunker is a USA Today Bestselling author, off-gridder, husband, and father of four children. He lives with his family in a “plain” community in Central Texas, where he reads and writes books… and occasionally tilts at windmills. In November of 2015, Variety Magazine announced that Michael had sold a film/TV option for his bestselling novel Pennsylvania to Jorgensen Pictures. JP is currently developing Pennsylvania for production into a feature film or Television series.

Forbes West was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois and graduated with a Master’s Degree in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach. He currently lives and works mostly in San Francisco and owns a home in Ojima, Japan—a village five hours south of Tokyo by car that is in the foothills of Mt. Fuji.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless poetic universe!

Held on the fourth Tuesday of every month, Malvern’s Multi-Verse features readings from guest poets, plus a Q & A session. Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month’s Malvern’s Multi-Verse will be hosted by our Curmudgeon in Chief, Joe Bratcher, and will feature readings and discussion with Thom the World Poet (pictured at right).

Thom is an improvising versifier in the Bardic tradition. He works with musicians of various persuasions, including Gong, Kangaroo Moon, and Invisible Opera Company of Tibet. He also publishes books which now number 253. He has hosted EXPRESSIONS for the last twenty years, and supports open mics and Poetry Festivals. He is a co-founder of the Austin International Poetry Festival.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha and featuring young women writers from the Austin community.

This month’s I Screamers are Micah Ruelle, Marilyse V. Figueroa, and Leticia Urieta.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic. Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.

Join us in celebrating the launch of The Entropy of Rocketman, a new collection of poems by Rita Anderson. Rita will be joined by writer Ray Shea.

The Entropy of Rocketman aligns the seasons of the heart with the four elements to take us on a tour de force through profound moments of joy, grief, and into the “in-between-ness of things” where humanity is reflected in stars that disappear.

“A classic lyric terrain of desire and loss creates the ground for the taut, smart poems in Rita Anderson’s The Entropy of Rocketman. With droll irony, Anderson describes love as a ‘noble gas’ (to be specific, the radioactive Uranium 238!), at once volatile and seductive; contemplates the ‘ancient need for more’; and returning imaginatively to explore the ‘old house’ (now empty but ‘still intact’) that love built, asks in a moment of wry paradox, ‘What if the undrawn line is the truest parameter, / one we cannot erase but would never cross?’ These poems shimmer with clarity, the deep and hard-won emotional wisdom that limns this brilliant collection.” —Cynthia Hogue, director, Creative Writing Program at ASU 

Rita Anderson, a member of Poets & Writers, the Academy of American Poets, ICWP, and ScriptWorks, has a MFA Creative Writing and a MA Playwriting. A published and award-winning playwright and poet, Rita went on scholarship to The O’Neill. Her play, Frantic is the Carousel, was the 2013 National Partners American Theatre nominee, when she won the Kennedy Center’s Ken Ludwig Playwriting Award for “best body of work.” She’s had numerous productions to include NYC, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Detroit, Cincinnati—and in London, England and Paris, France. Early Liberty, internationally published at www.offthewallplays.com, is on their “Best Selling Plays” list. Rita was poetry editor of the literary journal at University of New Orleans. She won the Houston Poetry Festival, the Gerreighty Prize, the Robert F. Gibbons Poetry Award, the Cheyney Award, and an award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, EVENT Magazine (British Columbia), Blue Heron Review, Ellipsis, The Longleaf Pine (Midwood Press), DLC Literary Journal, Cahoodaloodaling, The Blueshift Journal, Blotterature, Words Work, Transcendence, PHIction, Persona (50^th Anniversary Edition), The Artful Mind, Di-Verse-City: An Austin Poetry Anthology, Inflight Magazine (Paper Plane Pilots Publishing), The Stardust Gazette, and Explorations. 

Ray Shea’s writing has appeared in The Southeast Review, Sundog Lit, The Austin Review, Hobart, Phoebe and elsewhere. He is a frequent contributor to The Rumpus and is Memoir Editor at Split Lip Magazine. A native of Boston and New Orleans, he lives in Austin.

Join Austin indie romance authors Cate Lawley, Regina Morris, and Kay Manis (left to right, below), as they read selections from their works and discuss how they made the leap to indie publishing.

Cate Lawley is the pen name for Kate Baray’s sweet romances and cozy mysteries, including The Goode Witch Matchmaker and Vegan Vamp series. She writes and lives in Austin, Texas (where many of her stories take place) with her pack of pointers and hounds. Cate has worked as an attorney, a manager, a tractor sales person, and a dog trainer, but writing is the hands-down winner. When she’s not tapping away at her keyboard or in deep contemplation of her next fanciful writing project, she’s sweeping up hairy dust bunnies and watching British mysteries. Cate also writes paranormal (Lost Library) and urban fantasy (Spirelli) as Kate Baray and thrillers (Beauregard) as K.D. Baray. 

Regina Morris writes sensual and suspenseful paranormal romances about a covert team of vampires who protect the President of the United States. She also writes contemporary romances and fantasy/time-travel. She’s a software engineer by day, and writer by night and on weekends. Writing is her passion and tea and chocolate fuel her so she can write late into the night.

Kay Manis is a funny chick who’s sprinkled with a little crazy on top. Okay, let’s be honest… there’s ALOTTA crazy up there. She writes books filled with passion, promise and purpose (with laughter and a few tears, but always an HEA). She is a native Texan and lives with her family in Austin. When not reading or writing, you’ll find Kay eating out with friends or napping with her favorite pillow (stolen from an Inn in Vermont—true story). 

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: two published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night focuses on works of historical fiction and features S.D. Banks and Sugar Lee Ryder. S.D. will be reading from Transcendent Loyalties: A Novel of the American Revolution, and Sugar Lee will be reading from The Gaslight Gunslinger, book one of her Matthew Slade Western detective series.

S.D. Banks is a native Texan, and a long-time resident of Austin. For much of Banks’ adult life, her focus was on her husband, son and working at paying jobs. It was when she went back to college later in life to complete a degree that had been put on hold that encouragement from history and English professors convinced her that she should rekindle her writing dream, and pointed her toward a melding of her passion for history and love of writing. Banks graduated summa cum laude from Texas State University where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in history, with a minor in writing. She credits her history professors there with demonstrating that an understanding of history can give us the key we need to understand the present. “Many of the trials, conflicts, and dilemmas we face today are either continuations of situations that have gone on for centuries, or are so similar to past events that the relevance of the parallels cannot be ignored,” she says. “Knowing these things—understanding the ramifications of how they played out in the past—can keep us as a society from being manipulated or misled, and can help make us as individuals better citizens and wiser voters.” Banks adds what is essentially her mission statement. “If, through my novels, I can impart a few nuggets of historical knowledge in an entertaining way, then I feel I’ve been successful.”

Sugar Lee Ryder was born to a pair of Wild West rodeo show performers. It made for an interesting time growing up, to put it mildly. She lives in Austin, Texas. Her books include the bestselling contemporary romance Cowgirl Up, the lesbian-themed historical romance Sagebrush & Lace, and two western detective series—The Gaslight Gunslinger and Maddie Slade.

Join us for an evening with poets Michael McLaughlin and mónica teresa ortiz. Michael will be reading from his most recent collection of poetry, Countless Cinemas. 

Michael McLaughlin is both a restless and weary traveler. Countless Cinemas thoughtfully explores the difficulty of genuine connection in the midst of our everyday struggles. McLaughlin’s poetic sensibility is vivid and engaging, his aesthetic dynamic and visceral. He unflinchingly examines the subjectivity of our experience, offering readers “a universe of closet-sized cinemas / each occupied by a single person / eternally viewing a different film.

A three-time California Arts Council grant recipient, Michael McLaughlin has worked for twenty-six years as an Artist-in-Residence at Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum security forensic facility, as a Contract Artist with the California Department of Corrections and as San Luis Obispo County Area Coordinator for California Poets in the Schools. Founding editor of USC’s Southern California Anthology, Michael  McLaughlin has written two novels, Western People Show Their Faces and Gang of One. His third and most recent collection of poetry, Countless Cinemas (University of Hell Press, Portland, Oregon) came out last March. Originally from San Francisco, McLaughlin currently lives on the central California coast with his brilliant and beautiful wife. Selected Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo county in 2003, he runs Santa Marias’ Live from the CORE poetry/performance series and is an Artist in Residence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California.

mónica teresa ortiz was born and raised in Texas. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Borderlands, the Texas Observer, Black Girl Dangerous, and elsewhere. A two-time Andres Montoya Letras Latinas Poetry Prize finalist, ortiz is the poetry editor for Raspa Magazine, a queer Latino literary art journal.

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Join us in celebrating the third birthday of this fun and friendly evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

Austin Writers Roulette is an uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Romance & Other Patriarchal Fantasies.” Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for a reading from visiting poet Bruce Willard, who will be sharing work from his most recent collection, Violent Blues (Four Way Books). Bruce will be joined by poet Joe Brundidge.

Violent Blues is a blues-harp album of words, a soundtrack of loss, introspection and renewal—one man’s search for intimacy and enduring music. Its poems are rooted in the natural world and tethered by concrete experience.

Bruce Willard’s poems have appeared in 5 A.M., African American Review, Agni online, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Salamander, NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, and numerous other publications. His first collection of poems, Holding Ground, was published by Four Way Books in 2013. Willard is a graduate of Middlebury College and holds a MFA from Bennington College’s Writing Seminars program. He spends his time in Maine, Colorado, and California. In addition to his work as a poet, Willard currently runs 32 Bar Blues and oversees several other clothing businesses.

Joe Brundidge is an author, host, and public speaker living in Austin, Texas. He has hosted a number of open mics for almost 20 years to include his own show, “Spoken&Heard” at Kick Butt Coffee. He also served as the Director of the Austin International Poetry Festival for three years, from 2012-2015. He is currently co-host of KOOP 91.7fm’s “Writing On The Air.”

Join us for an afternoon with poets Ginny Wiehardt, Julie Poole, and Drea Brown.

Ginny Wiehardt’s chapbook Migration won the 2016 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Willow Springs. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Jentel. Originally from Texas, she now lives in New York, NY with her family.

Julie Poole is a poetry MFA candidate in the New Writers’ Project at the University of Texas. She received a BA from Columbia University. Currently living in Austin, she runs writing workshops for people with dementia, as a teaching artist for the Austin Public Library. She is the co-founder and editor of a poetry publication called BRIDGE, which can be found at Malvern Books and independent bookstores elsewhere. 

Drea Brown’s work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, such as Southern Indiana Review and Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, and winner of the 2014 Gold Line chapbook contest, her chapbook dear girl: a reckoning was published in 2015. Drea is currently a PhD candidate in African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin.