Malvern Books

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Cyrus Cassells, whose sixth volume of poetry, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, is out now from Southern Illinois University Press.

Cyrus Cassells is the author of The Mud Actor, winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series Competition; Soul Make a Path through Shouting, nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and The Crossed-Out Swastika, finalist for the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2012. He teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

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 has a terrifying vampire twist, with C.S. Humble reading from The Massacre at Yellow Hill, a Wild West vampire adventure, and A.K. Fagan reading from a horror novel that takes place in a world where governments have conspired to hide vampires’ existence from the public.

C.S. Humble is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in East Texas. His debut novel The Massacre at Yellow Hill is a Weird Western adventure available through Black Rose Writing.

Born and raised in Austin, Texas, A. K. Fagan is a long-time aspiring author. Her first completed horror erotica novel, Sweet Cinnamon and Honey, Book One of the Blood and Lust series, was brought to Lulu with the help of friends, family, and online fans. Fagan has been writing horror erotica stories online for several years before the publication of Sweet Cinnamon and Honey and has garnered the support from the online writing community. Fagan enjoys sushi, Indian food, and like any good American, hamburgers. She has a fat Siamese cat, Nero, who is an aspiring model and constantly disgruntled by everything, as well as a beautiful Husky named Yuki who, despite her breed, prefers to lounge in the sun and sleep the day away. Fagan also enjoys playing RPGs, reading, and watching anime. Other hobbies include travel, learning new languages, and studying psychology.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is writer Natalia Sylvester.

Natalia Sylvester is the author of the novels Chasing the Sun and Everyone Knows You Go Home, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by Real Simple. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Miami and is a faculty member of the low-res MFA program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Natalia’s articles have appeared in Latina Magazine, Writer’s Digest, The Austin American-Statesman, and NBCLatino.com. Born in Lima, Peru, she came to the U.S. at age four and spent time in South and Central Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas before her family set roots in Miami. She now lives and works in Austin.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

This all-women reading features writers from the Revolution Writing Workshop led by Abe Louise Young. Join us for poetry and prose about mothering, queer and straight parenting, being mothered and unmothered, sex, Mother Earth, and more! Readers include: Angeliska Polachek, Jamie Harris, Erin Flynn, Rebecca Whitehurst, Robin Bradford, Marcela Contreras, and Kandice Farmer.

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 “Minding Another’s Business.” The featured artists include: LIABLEWRITER, ALLISON JONES, KELLY CARA, CARRIE ANN PAULO, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, BRENNAN UTLEY, SPENCER MIRABAL, TERESA Y ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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 literary universe! 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 guest is Cecily Sailer.

Cecily Sailer is the programs director for The Library Foundation, which runs the Badgerdog Creative Writing Program—a community-based literary arts education program for writers of all ages and skill levels. Cecily holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston, and has taught creative writing to a variety of audiences. On the side, she coaches writers through book projects, and writes occasional book reviews for The Dallas Morning News. She is also the founder of Typewriter Tarot, a collective of writers who offer Tarot readings in private or event settings.

Join us for an evening with David Abel and Cathy Eisenhower.

Poet and editor David Abel is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. Two new books were released late in 2017: Selected Durations, an artist’s book published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada, Reno, and XIV Eclipses, a series of performative poems/scores from Couch Press in Portland; two chapbooks are forthcoming: Sequitur Her, from press-press-pull in Portland, and Equifinality, from Crane’s Bill in Albuquerque. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series (now in its seventeenth year), he is also an occasional curator and educator, and a consultant with the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a psychotherapist in Austin and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), would with and (Roof 2009), distance decay (Ugly Duckling 2015), and animalitos (Primary Writing 2017). She has translated the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and co-curated the In Your Ear Reading Series in Washington, DC, for several years. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Good Bones by Maggie Smith.

Smith’s poem “Good Bones” was called “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International. In the collection of the same name, Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Amanda Johnston’s debut poetry collection, Another Way to Say Enter. Amanda will be joined by Lisa L. Moore.

In Amanda Johnston’s debut collection, Another Way to Say Enter, readers are offered glimpses of scenes as if peering through windows and doors. Bright and sharp, precise in their Imagism, Johnston’s poems distill moments to their essence, challenge notions of what it means to fully examine a life day by day, room by room. These poems are both visceral and spiritual, reminding the reader that entry, departure, and the inevitable return is a journey that must be felt, not just imagined. —Teneice Durrant, Argus House Press

Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press). Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them Callaloo, Poetry, Kinfolks Quarterly, Muzzle, Pluck! and the anthologies Small Batch, di-ver-city and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts.

Lisa L. Moore is an Alberta-born writer who has lived in Austin, Texas for almost thirty years. She’s the author of the chapbook 24 Hours of Men (Dancing Girl, 2018). Her poems have appeared recently in Nimrod International Journal, The Fourth River, and Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. Her poetry and critical writing have been recognized with the Art/Lines Juried Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Foundation Book Award. The author or editor of five books of literary criticism, she teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Join us for a reading from members of Donna M. Johnson’s literary nonfiction workshop. Readers include Jay Byrd, Carrie Kenny, Jennifer Patterson, Marcie Bruscato Poss, Beth Remsburg, Nettie Reynolds, Rosaia Shepard, Steph Steele, Robin Storey, and Mahani Zubedy.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Take To The Territory, Jim Trainer’s fourth collection of poetry and prose through Yellow Lark Press. With readings from Jim, Ignacio Carvajal, and Christine Schiele.

Singer-songwriter, journalist, and curator of Going For The Throat, a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance, Jim Trainer publishes one collection of poetry and prose every year through Yellow Lark Press. Please visit his website for Take To The Territory, his latest collection, and for music, film, and appearances.

Photo credit: Adam Glick Photography

Ignacio “Brown Thought” Carvajal is from Costa Rica. He’s a PhD student of Latin American Literature at UT Austin. He’s a member of the Latino Writers Collective of Kansas City and the Taller Literario Don Chico in San José, Costa Rica. His work has appeared in the anthologies @Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.

Christine Schiele is a writer, storyteller and, at times, a performance artist. Under various names, she has brought her passion for the bizarre to stages at FronteraFest, Testify, Bedpost Confessions, LAFF! (Ladies Are Funny Festival), The Living Room: Storytime for Grownups, Kink Ball and Weird! True Hollywood Tales (RIP). Christine also performs as a mentalist with the magic act Turning Tricks with The Darlings.

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

This month’s selection is Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó, a striking story of the relationship between a mother and a daughter who come from two different worlds and have different ideas of what it means to lead a good life.

Magda Szabo’s work casts an indirect light upon the dimness that exists between our public and private selves, a place wherein our betrayals—both personal and political—flicker uneasily over the walls . . . Iza’s Ballad should solidify Szabo’s standing as a master novelist amongst her English-language readers.
—Dustin Illingworth, LitHub

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Rachel Z. Arndt’s essay collection, Beyond Measure.

With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Rachel Z. Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the standardized height of kitchen countertops; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute. “How much can data tell us?” Arndt asks, challenging us to consider the simultaneous comfort and absurdity of our exhaustively quantified—yet never entirely quantifiable—lives.

Rachel Z. Arndt received MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and nonfiction editor of the Iowa Review. Her writing has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Quartz, Pank, and Fast Company, among others. She is currently the assistant editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series and a reporter. She lives in Chicago.

Join us for an evening with Elizabeth Threadgill, Melissa Cundieff and Roger Jones. Elizabeth Threadgill is celebrating the launch of her chapbook Tangled in the Light (Finishing Line Press), and Melissa Cundieff is celebrating the launch of her book Darling Nova (Autumn House Press).

Elizabeth Threadgill holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Developmental Education-Literacy, both from Texas State University. She grew up in Marfa, Texas, and now lives in upstate New York with her husband, poet James Henry Knippen. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Utica College. Tangled in the Light marks Elizabeth’s poetry debut and is representative of landscape and life in rural Texas.

Melissa Cundieff is the author of Darling Nova, selected by Alberto Ríos for the 2017 Autumn House Press Full-Length Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt, and her poems have appeared in such places as Best of the Net, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Mid-American Review, TriQuarterly, and Four Way Review. Originally from Texas, she lives in Saint Paul, MN with her two children.

Roger Jones has a BA and MA from Sam Houston State University and a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University. He has taught at SHSU, Oklahoma State and Lamar University in Beaumont, and since 1987, has taught at Texas State University in San Marcos, where he has served since 1998 on the MFA Creative Writing poetry faculty. He has published poems in various journals since the 1970s. The Texas Review Press published his chapbook Remembering New London in 1981, and his full collections Strata (1993) and Are We There Yet? (2008). In 2015, Finishing Line Press published his chapbook Familial, and his collection of Japanese haibun poems Goodbye was published as an electronic chapbook in 2017 by the Snapshot Press in the UK.

Please join us for a celebratory reading by the writers of S. Kirk Walsh’s nine-month fiction workshop (Sept-June). Short excerpts from novels and short stories will be read.

Participating writers include Cristina Adams, Erin Augustine, Nicole Beckley, Deborah de Freitas, Matt Holmes, Lisa Jackson, Jack Kaulfus, Alejandro Puyana, Victoria Rossi, Ramona Reeves, Siobhan Welch, and Stefani Zellmer. This talented group of writers features published fiction and nonfiction writers, book critics, and MFA graduates. For the past nine months, they have participated in an intensive fiction workshop, drafting and revising novels and short stories throughout the year. Please join us in celebrating their inspiring work and distinctive voices with this end-of-the-workshop reading. Refreshments and sweets will be served.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

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 “Never-Ending Tomorrow”—who knows when this s@#% will end? Take a break from the never-ending heat with our lineup of featured poets and storytellers: NICOLE CORTICHIATO, HALEY CAMPBELL, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, RG HOOK, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, & THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows.Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of award-winning author Roger Thompson’s new book, No Word for Wilderness: Italy’s Grizzlies and the Race to Save the Rarest Bears on Earth (Ashland Creek Press).

In Italian, there is no word for wilderness. Yet in the mountains of Italy, brown bears not only exist, they are fighting to survive amid encroaching development, local and international politics, and the mafia. This meticulously researched and eye-opening book tells the incredible stories of two special populations of bears in Italy—one the last vestige of a former time that persists against all odds, the other a great experiment in re-wilding that, if successful, promises to change how we see not only Italy but all of Europe. The stories of these bears take readers on a spectacular journey across Italy, where we come face-to-face not only with these fascinating species but with embattled park directors, heroic environmentalists, innovative scientists, and a public that is coming to terms with the importance of Italy’s rich natural history. Award-winning author Roger Thompson has traveled throughout Italy documenting the history and current crises of these bears, and the result is an engaging and in-depth examination that resonates across all endangered species and offers invaluable insights into the ever-evolving relationships between human and non-human animals in a rapidly changing world.

Roger Thompson is an award-winning nonfiction writer and director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. His work and features have appeared in the New York Times, theatlantic.com, Ozy, Quartz, Raw Vision, and others, and he is senior editor for a fine art photography magazine based in Brooklyn.

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 donating all proceeds from this Novel Night to CASA and Malaria No More.

This month’s Novel Night guests are Maureen Asantewaa and H.R. Young-Lira. Maureen will be reading from her debut novel, Tenth Year in the Sun, and H.R. Young-Lira will also be sharing her debut novel, The Truth About Sunday Minor.

In high school, Maureen Asantewaa dreamt of writing, but it would be over twenty years before she entertained the idea of writing as a career. In the meantime, she began work in Human Resources in Houston and D.C. before eventually moving overseas. There, she experienced many fulfilling moments as she traveled and lived around the world. Later, as Maureen delved into fiction, she made sisterhood and West African culture a recurring theme in her work. She crafts her inspirational literature from her home base in Austin, Texas. Maureen’s debut novel, Tenth Year in the Sun, is a women’s fiction story inspired by her experiences and the connections she made in her life at home and abroad. Maureen describes the novel as being “at the intersection of Women’s Fiction and West African culture.”

H.R. Young-Lira is a Texas writer living east of Austin among the loblollies of Lost Pines Forest. She is shopkeeper of Loblolly Lost, an online bookstore of curated collectibles for the personal library. She graduated from the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Texas State University. The Truth About Sunday Minor is her first novel.

It’s Bloomsday! Named for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloomsday is observed around the world on June 16th, as this is the date during which the events of Ulysses are relived (16th June, 1904). Join us for a celebration of the life of James Joyce, with short readings from Ulysses (sign up in store on the day if you’d like to read!) and suitably Irish snacks.

You’re invited to join us for the sixth Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s readers are Elizabeth Crook, Spike Gillespie, Alyce Guynn, and Ray Bonneville (left to right, below).

Founded in 2010 by Peg Alford Pursell, Why There Are Words is an award-winning literary reading series that takes place every second Thursday in the San Francisco Bay Area, and beginning in 2017, will take place at 5 more national locations: New York City, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Austin. Each reading event presents a range of writers, including those who have published books and those who haven’t. All writers share the criterion of excellence. The guiding idea behind the series is that good work is timeless and needs to be heard regardless of marketing or commercial concerns. If you’re interested in reading or would like more information, please contact Alison: wtawaustin@gmail.com.

Elizabeth Crook lived in Nacogdoches, Texas and then San Marcos, Texas with her parents and brother and sister until age seven when the family moved to Washington D.C. She attended Baylor University for two years and graduated from Rice University in 1982. She has written five novels: The Raven’s Bride and Promised Lands, published by Doubleday and reissued by SMU Press as part of the Southwest Life and Letters series; The Night Journal, published by Viking/Penguin in 2006 and reissued in paperback by Penguin; Monday, Monday, published by Sarah Crichton Books, FSG, in April 2014 and reissued in paperback from Picador; and The Which Way Tree, published by Little, Brown and Company, available in February 2018 and optioned by Maverick Films LLC with Robert Duvall to star. Elizabeth has written for periodicals such as Texas Monthly and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and served on the council of the Texas Institute of Letters and the board of the Texas Book Festival. She is a member of Women Writing the West, Western Writers of America, and was selected the honored writer for 2006 Texas Writers’ Month. Her first novel, The Raven’s Bride, was the 2006 Texas Reads: One Book One Texas selection. The Night Journal was awarded the 2007 Spur award for Best Long Novel of the West and the 2007 Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction. Monday, Monday was awarded the 2015 Jesse H. Jones award for fiction. Elizabeth currently lives in Austin with her family. 

Spike Gillespie is the critically acclaimed author of many books and countless magazine articles. Austin Chronicle readers voted her Best Memoirist in Austin in 2016 and 2017. She writes the blogs EmotionalRapeSurvivor.com and MeditationKicksAss.com. Spike’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Real Simple, GQ, Esquire, Elle, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, Interweave KNITS, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News, and other publications. In 2006, Austin Chronicle readers voted her Best Author in Austin. Spike also provides commentary for Austin’s NPR affiliate, KUT. She lives on a ranch just outside of Austin with horses, cows, chickens, and dogs.

Alyce Guynn has always loved words, especially when served up with a heaping helping of music. She began public reading at Austin’s iconic Alamo Lounge and emmajoe’s. Alyce also loves collaboration. Deal Me In, her book of 52 love poems, is illustrated by Jesse ‘Guitar’ Taylor. She enjoys performing with musicians who add their magic to her words. The chapbook Beyond Blue is her homage to the late Champ Hood, with whom, along with Marvin Dykhuis, she often performed. Marvin and Alyce recorded a CD featuring poems from Deal Me In with Marvin providing the music. Alyce’s poems appear in Feeding the Crow, Seventh Quarry, various chapbooks, magazines, liner notes, blogs and anthologies. She arrived in Austin in the mid-sixties as a newspaper reporter and has worked the last 33 years as an antitrust investigator. 

Ray Bonneville is a poet of the demimonde who didn’t write his first song until his early 40s, some 20 years after he started performing. But with a style that sometimes draws comparisons to JJ Cale and Daniel Lanois, this blues-influenced, New Orleans-inspired “song and groove man,” as he’s been so aptly described, luckily found his rightful calling. Born in Quebec, his family moved to Boston when he was 12. He served a year in Vietnam as a Marine, struggled and overcame drug addiction, earned a pilot’s license in Colorado, then moved to Alaska, then Seattle, and Paris and New Orleans. But it took a close call while piloting a seaplane across the Canadian wilderness to make him decide it was time to get busy writing songs. He’s since earned many accolades, including a Juno Award for his 1999 album, Gust of Wind. His post-Katrina ode, “I Am the Big Easy,” earned the International Folk Alliance’s 2009 Song of the Year Award, and in 2012, Bonneville won the solo/duet category in the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge. Easy Gone, Ray’s fourth album for Red House Records, takes listeners to some of the dark spaces and exotic places Bonneville has gone on his own travels. An Austin resident since 2006, Bonneville still puts the rhythms and soul of New Orleans into much of his music. His songs carry a groove and momentum that’s uniquely his—and will always be a part of him, no matter where he roams.

Join us in celebrating the recent release of visiting author Mark Haskell Smith’s novel Blown. With host Jill Alexander Essbaum.

Biting satire and criminal mischief abound in Mark Haskell Smith’s new novel Blown, which follows a Wall Street trader who disappears—with millions in stolen cash—and the madcap team of investigators on his trail in the Cayman Islands in this hot, hilarious case of offshore banking gone awry. Wickedly funny, ribald, and sharp-eyed, Blown starts as a simple case of embezzlement and explodes into a fatal high-stakes gamble for money and the pursuit of happiness.

Mark Haskell Smith is the author of five novels, most recently Raw: A Love Story, and the nonfiction book Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Vulture. He lives in Los Angeles.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Get your cones ready for the third anniversary of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha.

When we first started the I Scream Social, our vision was that a small group of young women writers from Austin would come together for just one summer to share what they’d been working on while eating some free ice cream. But that one summer turned into three years and that small group turned into an incredible, diverse community of artists from across the country breaking all the moulds of what the written & spoken word can do. And the ice cream just turned into even more ice cream.

To celebrate our third birthday, we’ll have ice cream cake, raffled prizes, a photo booth, and, of course, the open mic!

~7pm – Inclusive open mic. All are welcome. Don’t be shy!

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

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is On Lost Sheep by Japanese Modernist poet Shiro Murano (1901-1975), translated by Goro Takano.

In order to survive at all as a poet Murano had to cross the treacherous boundary of pre and postwar cultural ideologies —the latter just as guilty in its omissions as the earlier era was in its excess. Hence Murano’s realism is of necessity a tragic one. He believed that the poet writes from the night of the world in the face of the forgetting of Being. The task of the poet was to break free of this night. Murano summed up his poetics as a yearning for authentic Being. Goro Takano’s translations pass through this difficult terrain with painstaking care, reflecting the precision of the original while at the same time not shying away from allowing the strain of such a task to show through—a strain which we both know is more than merely a linguistic one. —Eric Selland

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us for a reading and exhibit to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.

Bring friends – join the celebration! The event is free of charge and open to everyone.

Keynote poet is Joe Brundidge, a well-known presence at Austin poetry scenes for nearly 20 years. A frequent host and public speaker, Brundidge co-hosts KOOP 91.7FM’s “Writing on the Air” and is a former director of the International Poetry Festival and of the “Spoken & Heard” poetry series. His most recent book, Element 615, was published by Lit City Press in 2017 and is reviewed in the new issue by Rachel A. Wise.

Featured artist Eric Tippeconnic, a member of the Comanche Nation, will engage us with an art talk based on his series “Comanche Motion” on view at the Bullock Texas State History Museum through Jan. 2, 2019. Tippeconnic’s vibrant artwork honors the Comanche culture historically and as a “living, thriving and contemporary” nation. Tippeconnic will sign limited edition posters of Borderlands issue 48 cover featuring his visually-striking artwork “Traditional Comanche Woman” as a special fundraiser for the journal.

Borderlands is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

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 literary universe! 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 guest is Teresa Y. Roberson.

Author, spoken word poet and producer of The Austin Writers Roulette, Teresa Y. Roberson writes based on her survival skills honed through working and traveling globally, cooking and eating ethnic food, doing yoga and dancing, and challenging society’s preconceived ideas about minority women.

When Chinese novelist Su Wei​ ​and his translator Austin Woerner first met in 2005, little did they know that their friendship would spark a ten-year-long experiment in creative co-translation that would take them from the classrooms of Yale to the mountains of​ ​southern China​ ​and back again. Join​ ​Austin as he recounts​ ​this literary odyssey, culminating in the publication of​ ​his​ ​English translation of Su’s novel​ ​​​The​ ​Invisible Valley in English this April​,​​ ​by Small Beer Press​.​ Austin​ ​will reveal the story behind​ ​the story, a coming-of-age narrative set during the Cultural Revolution against a backdrop of rainforest landscapes, Taoist mysticism, and Cantonese folklore. In the process​ ​he will share the​ ​joys and complexities of​ ​literary​ ​translation and​ ​his adventures in Chinese literature both on and off the page.

In tropical southern China, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a teenage boy named Lu Beiping stumbles upon a band of woodcutters living deep in the mountains. Outcasts from mainstream society, the “driftfolk,” as they call themselves, practice a secret faith whose central tenets would be heresy in the world Lu Beiping comes from. As he is drawn deeper into their way of life—a realm of strange freedoms and restrictions, where the line between magic and reality is not always clear—Lu must struggle with what is natural and what is truly deviant, and learn to play a precarious balancing act between two taboo-ridden worlds.​ ​(​You can read an excerpt here​.)​

Like many Chinese writers of his generation, Su Wei spent his teenage years being “re-educated” through farm labor in the countryside, working for ten years on a rubber plantation in the mountains of tropical Hainan Island. He is known for his nonfiction essays as well as for his highly imaginative novels, which are seen as unique in their treatment of the Cultural Revolution. He fled China in 1989, and since 1997 he has taught Chinese language and literature at Yale University. ​​The Invisible Valley is his first book to be translated into English.

A Chinese-English literary translator, Austin Woerner has translated two volumes of poetry, ​​Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe and ​​Phoenix, and edited the English edition of the innovative, bilingual Chinese literary journal ​​Chutzpah! Together with Ou Ning, he co-edited the short fiction anthology ​​Chutzpah! New Voices from China. He has a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School, and he is currently a lecturer at Duke Kunshan University.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the third issue of Kallisto Gaia Press’ literary journal, The Ocotillo Review, which features over 100 pages of literary genius by award-winning writers from around the world and superb new pieces by writers from underserved communities. Numerous poets and writers will read excerpts of their work from this edition.

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

This month’s selection is Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama. First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay.

Available in English for the first time, this 1956 classic of Argentine literature presents a riveting portrait of a mind deteriorating as the 18th century draws to a close … The final images of the novel are haunting and unforgettable. This extraordinary novel, whose English translation has been so long in coming, is a once and future classic.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

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 “Dog Days/Cat Nights”—the days may be long and grueling, but the freaks come out at night! The lineup of featured artists includes: RG HOOK, NICOLE CORTICHIATO, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows the featured artists. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is novelist, poet, and essayist Anis Shivani.

Anis Shivani is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of several books of fiction, poetry, and criticism each, including, most recently, Karachi Raj: A Novel, Soraya: Sonnets, Literary Writing in the 21^st Century: Conversations, and the forthcoming A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. His work appears in many leading literary journals. 

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Keith R. Rees’ new novel, One Night in Bangkok.

Miles Devereaux, an ordinary, working class, family man, is thrust sixty years into the dazzling futuristic world of 2065 Bangkok, and into a life-and-death game of chess where the players and pieces’ fates depend on each player’s acumen. Requiring Miles to match wits and physical skills with an array of opponents while faced with solving the mystery of his time travel and how to return to his own time, One Night in Bangkok is a riveting adventure set in what might very well be our own future.

Keith R. Rees has been writing professionally for over 20 years. One Night in Bangkok, a science fiction work, is the first installment in what is projected to become The One Night Trilogy. He has always been a fan of science fiction, particularly stories that involve time travel, and writes stories that have both realistic and human sides to them.

Join us for an evening with Emmy Pérez, Leticia Urieta, Marilyse V. Figueroa, and Britt Haraway (left to right, below). Hosted by ire’ne lara silva.

Emmy Pérez is the author of With the River on Our Face and Solstice. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship. She’s a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop and is an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Leticia Urieta is proud Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She works as a teaching artist in the Austin community. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets Anthology, BorderSenses, Lumina, The Offing and others. She has recently completed her first mixed genre collection of poetry and prose and is currently at work completing her novel that tells the story of a Mexican soldadera caught up in the march to Texas during Texas’ war with Mexico.

Marilyse V. Figueroa is an unapologetic Scorpio just like Björk, and a proud queer femme Xicana – Puerto Riqueña from Oklahoma and Texas. Marilyse’s work has been published in Acentos Review, Southwestern American Literature, St. Sucia Zine, and many others. Marilyse has been the Director of the San Marcos, Texas Chapter of Barrio Writers Workshop since 2017, and she is currently the Artist-In-Residence at the Writing Barn in Austin. Her work embodies a fascination with hybridity–a mezcla of fiction, poetry, testimonio, sci-fi and fantasy. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and an experimental novella.

Britt Haraway has a short story collection Early Men which was published by Lamar University Literary Press. His stories have appeared in Natural Bridge, New Madrid, Great Weather for Media, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. His work was chosen for the Best Small Fictions 2016, guest edited by Stuart Dybek. He is an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the fiction editor for riverSedge magazine. He lives in McAllen Texas with his family.

Desiree Morales is an educator, poet, and activist from Southern California, where she earned her BA in Creative Writing and Linguistics from Pitzer College. Since coming to Austin in 2010, she’s created and led programs that have served nearly 10,000 low income children in Travis County. She currently oversees a pilot project in Austin ISD offering entrepreneurial learning opportunities to students in South Austin and participates in the Cultural Proficiency and Inclusiveness initiative. Her work has appeared in What Rough Beast, Truck: I35 Creativity Corridor, and Conflict of Interest. Has yet to meet a coconut/non-dairy ice cream she doesn’t like, though chocolate is pretty great!

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Shatter the Bell in My Ear: Selected Poems of Christine Lavant, translated by David Chorlton.

Born in Austria in 1915, Christine Thonhauser (Lavant) was the ninth child of a miner, Georg, and his wife, Anna, and grew up in poverty. While the poetry she was later to write contained the language of spirituality, the pain she described in it came from actual conditions which she suffered: scrofula and tuberculosis of the lungs. Being disadvantaged in health also meant she could not complete her education as intended. Unable to do hard physical work, she earned a living with knitting and weaving until she gained a reputation as a writer. Writing sometimes in rhyme, sometimes in free verse, Lavant employed directness in her language.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

This month’s selection is The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette, a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew—a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.

The Mad and the Bad is so dark it redefines noir: bleak and pointed, yes, but also infused with an understanding that what passes between us is not only compromised but more often faithless, less a matter of commitment or connection than a kind of unrelenting animal need. —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

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 guests are Barbara Ann Wright, Matthew Borgard, and Erin Kennemer.

Barbara Ann Wright writes fantasy and sci-fi. Her fiction has made Tor.com’s Reviewer’s Choice books of 2012 and BookRiot’s 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors. She has been a Foreword Review BOTYA Finalist as well as a Goldie and Lambda Award finalist. She’s won five Rainbow Awards.

Matthew Borgard is a writer and software engineer living in Cedar Park. His short fiction has appeared in several collections, including the Stoker-nominated Dark Tales of Lost  Civilizations, as well as Crowded Magazine. His nonfiction writing has appeared on Eleven-ThirtyEight and in Cheyenne’s hometown newspaper, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle.

Erin Kennemer is a speculative fiction author of several short stories. She studied at Texas A&M and continues to owe them money to this day. You can find her elbow deep in the dirt outside on off days, either gardening or burying another body. If you want on her good side, bring hummus and veggies.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

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 “Eight Reasons To…”—why do you do what you do? An open mic follows the featured artists. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Join us for a night of broads reading chap(book)s and broad(side)s! Featuring Claire Bowman, Julie Howd, Vanessa Couto Johnson, Bridget Brewer, Stephanie Goehring, and Julie Poole.

Bridget Brewer (bottom left) is a writer, artist, performer, and educator based in Austin, TX. She earned her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2016, and currently serves as the Fiction Co-Editor for Nat Brut. Her work has appeared in FANZINE, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, The Collagist, Awst Press, and elsewhere.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Some Animal by Ely Shipley.

Aligned with queer theories of temporality, fragments of memoir rub against the language of psychiatric and medical regimes at the site of a body that does not conform to a gender binary. Some Animal draws out dream-like and supernatural resonances between the literature of pathology and experiences of gender dysphoria.

 

“This remarkable, brilliant and brave poetry by Ely Shipley is an emblem for our time when US-lawmakers are making LGBTQ bodies outlaw in many states, their Christian extremism telling an entire generation they are subhuman. Float out of body with these poems then come hurtling down to land on our feet together and demand safety, equity, and a place at the table for all people. I love this book!” —CA Conrad

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us in celebrating the recent launch of Laurie Filipelli’s new poetry collection, Girl Paper Stone. With musical guest flutist Marcela DeFaria Casaubon and a post-reading conversation led by author and composer Jan Bozarth.

In her luminous book, Filipelli remakes the constellations of a modern life. Her poems re-draw the lines between the parts of the world, helping us to see there are no divisions between planting a plumbago and watching the passage of hateful legislation, no space between grief for a lost father and the wonder of what he’s told the speaker: “the whale’s veins are so wide we could swim/ to her heart.” By looking so tenderly and incisively at the actual experience of a life, Filipelli makes us see our own differently. —Sasha West

Laurie Filipelli is the author of Elseplace (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013) and Girl Paper Stone (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her essays and poems have appeared at apt magazine, The Rumpus, Salamander, Superstition Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Yaddo fellowship and lives in Austin where she provides coaching and editing services through her business, Mighty Writing.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Austin: A Poem by Dave Oliphant (Alamo Bay Press). Dave will be joined by Kanya Lyons, who will share her video interview, “Dave Oliphant: Native Texas Poet.”

Written with knowledge and sympathy, the poem contains a delightful tangle of details. Lyndon Johnson, Elisabet Ney, Peter Flawn, Custer, O. Henry, and Joseph Jones (the sage of Waller Creek)—public figures and personal friends interact in the city of Oliphant’s imagination…. A lengthy proem, set at the grave of Stephen F. Austin in the State Cemetery, contains a brilliant passage about Austin in prison…. The oblique narration is kept on track with masterful transitions….[T]he language is carefully crafted, with interesting and often beautiful sound-play in virtually every line. —John Herndon, Austin American-Statesman

Dave Oliphant was born in 1939 in Fort Worth, Texas. Host Publications has published two of his collections of poetry, Memories of Texas Towns & Cities (2000) and Backtracking (2004). His Maria’s Poems (1987) won an Austin Book Award. Host has also published three books that he translated from the Spanish: Enrique Lihn’s Figures of Speech (1999); Oliver Welden’s Love Hound (2006), winner of best book of poetry at the 2007 New York Book Festival; and Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations (2009), winner of the 2011 translation award from the Texas Institute of Letters. KD: A Jazz Biography, his verse biography of Texas trumpeter Kenny Dorham, was published in 2012 by Wings Press, and The Pilgrimage: Selected Poems, 1962-2012 appeared from Lamar University Press in 2013. The poetry collections The Cowtown Circle and María’s Book were published by Alamo Bay Press in 2014 and 2016 respectively. He was with the University of Texas at Austin for 30 years, as an editor and a senior lecturer.

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

This month’s selection is Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz, a hilariously irreverent testament to dialogue. Talk is the result of conversations between three ambitious and artistic 30-somethings, recorded by Linda Rosenkrantz and transformed into a novel whose form and content put it well ahead of its time. Controversial upon its first publication in 1968, Talk remains fresh, lascivious, and laugh-out-loud funny nearly fifty years later.

Are New Yorkers the best talkers in the world? We’ve become familiar now with this style of talk—smart, witty, ironic, tangential, obsessing over trivia—through sitcoms like Friends; but Rosenkratz was among the first to realise that it’s an art-form in its own right. —Brandon Robshaw, The Independent

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

Join us for an evening with Elliott Turner, who will be reading from The Night of the Virgin, his award-winning debut novel.

The Night of the Virgin is 80,000 words of literary fiction that starts as a sports narrative and twists into a piercing confessional about the immigrant experience in the U.S. as its undocumented protagonist pursues his dream. It’s a fascinating read, particularly in this political climate.

Turner’s . . . expert knowledge of [soccer] is evident throughout, and it gives the story a near-journalistic authenticity. The novel as a whole … is richly drawn—a moving bildungsroman and a thoughtful reflection on what it means to lack a settled sense of self. —Kirkus Reviews

Elliott Turner’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, Fusion, Transect Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and many other journals. The Night of the Virgin is his debut novel, and a finalist for the International Latino Book Award for First Fiction. He studied political science at Emory University, and lives in Houston, Texas with his wife and three children.

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Hazem Fahmy’s debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer, winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Contest. Hazem will be joined by Jasmine C. Bell, Jordan Cooley, and Mark Cugini.

Hazem Fahmy is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet and critic from Cairo. He is currently pursuing his MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer, won the 2017 Diode Editions Contest. A Watering Hole Fellow, his poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in Apogee, HEArt, Mizna, and The Offing. His performances have been featured on Button Poetry and Write About Now. He is a reader for the Shade Journal, a poetry editor for Voicemail Poems, and a contributing writer to Film Inquiry.

Jasmine C. Bell (above left) is a poet and artist in Austin, Texas and currently attends the University of Texas in pursuit of her Master’s degree in Social Work. Jasmine has competed as part of the UT Spitshine CUPSI team from 2015-2017 and coached the team in 2018. She is Co-President of the only poetry organization on UT’s campus (Spitshine Poetry) where she leads workshops and organizes open mics. She was a 2017 Write Bloody Contest finalist and has been published or is forthcoming in Button Poetry, Write About Now, Vinyl, Bird’s Thumb, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, Monstering Magazine, and Apricity Magazine. She spends her time writing, studying, drawing, singing, and eating.

Jordan Cooley (above middle) is a writer and self taught artist in Austin, TX. She has work in or forth coming from Paper Darts, FIVE:2:ONE Press, Pressure Gauge Press, and others. When she isn’t writing, she’s doodling. She slings drinks for money, which is another way to say she loves to meet people and make things that those people enjoy.

Mark Cugini (They/Them/Theirs; above right) is a genderqueer poet, editor, and event curator from Staten Island, NY. They are the author of I’m Just Happy To Be Here (Ink Press, 2014) and have been published in Pen America, The Lifted Brow, Hyperallergic, Barrelhouse, and Noö. The founding editor of Big Lucks, they recently organized Whale Prom: An Alternative AWP Bookfair. They also really like whales.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

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 “Out of Tune,” when the prevailing logic is illogical. The featured artists, sharing their discordant narratives, include: SPENCER MIRABAL, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, SHLOMI HARIF, HOPE RUIZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows the featured artists. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Charlotte Gullick.

Charlotte Gullick is a novelist, essayist, editor, educator and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. Charlotte’s first novel, By Way of Water, was chosen by Jayne Anne Phillips as the Grand Prize winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program, and a special author’s edition was reissued by the Santa Fe Writers Project in November of 2013. Her other awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a MacDowell Colony Residency, a Ragdale Residency, Faculty of Year from College of the Redwoods as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award.  She has taught in the Travis County Correctional Complex and organized classes and literary events for Veterans in the Austin Community.  Additionally, she has presented twice at the Associated Writing Programs Annual Conference (Washington, DC and Chicago, IL) on offering writing courses for Veterans. Charlotte’s work often explores the intersection of landscape, legacy, family, and identity, and she believes deeply in the power of story to create healing and coherence. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and daughter.

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 is full of mystery (fiction)! Our guests are N. M. Cedeño, Meredith Lee, and Laura Oles.

N. M. Cedeño was born in Houston, grew up in the Dallas Metroplex, once lived in Amarillo, and currently lives near Austin, Texas. She writes mystery short stories and novels that are typically set in Texas. Her mysteries vary from traditional, to romantic suspense, to science fiction.

Meredith Lee is the pen name for the Austin-based writing team of Dixie Lee Evatt and Sue Meredith Cleveland. Their process includes research trips to foreign countries to sample wine and food and, when required, the occasional dramatic performance of a scene to make sure it “works.” Dixie Lee Evatt is a former political writer for the Austin American-Statesman. She later taught writing at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. While there she published a book, along with colleagues, on the communication practices of small organizations, Thinking Big. Staying Small. When she teamed up with Sue to write fiction, they sold a screenplay treatment to a Hollywood producer. Although the movie was never made, they used the seed money to found ThirtyNineStars, their publishing company. They also produced a second screenplay based on the life of a Waco schoolteacher who was imprisoned in World War I because of his German heritage and his work with early radio broadcasting. That screenplay, Wireless, was a finalist for the Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project in 2003. Sue Meredith Cleveland is an award-winning artist who has worked in multiple media including oil, watercolor, and fiber. Her earliest publications include articles advocating childbirth education and humanizing hospital care. Shrouded, a mystery Sue collaborated on with Dixie, was a finalist in the 2017 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Sue’s essays, literary memoir pieces, and short stories have been featured in award-winning literary journals, magazines, and blogs. Sue has written two pre-published Middle Grade novels: A Shadow Over Silver and Blue Water Over Dark Secrets.

Laura Oles’ debut mystery, Daughters of Bad Men, is an Agatha nominee, a Claymore Award finalist, and a Killer Nashville Readers’ Choice nominee. She is also a Writers’ League of Texas Award Finalist. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies, including Murder on Wheels, which won the Silver Falchion Award in 2016. She lives with her family in the Texas Hill Country.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is Rinku Sen, author of The Accidental American and Stir It Up: Lessons on Community Organizing.

Rinku Sen is a writer and a political strategist. With over 30 years experience leading racial justice organizations in the United States, she has trained thousands of organizers, activists and agents of social change across the country. Rinku is currently Senior Strategist at Race Forward, having formerly served as Executive Director and as Publisher of their award-winning news site Colorlines. Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward has generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes. One example is the groundbreaking 2011 Shattered Families report, which changed the immigration debate with investigative research on how record deportations of parents were leading to the placement of thousands of children in foster care, often separating them permanently and legally from their families. Sen was the architect of Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets dropping the i-word, affecting millions of readers every day. Her books Stir it Up and The Accidental American theorize a model of community organizing that integrates a political analysis of race, gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other systems. A key advisor in the philanthropy world, Rinku has worked with foundations like Novo, Open Society, Nathan Cummings and Kellogg. She is a devoted board member of numerous social justice organizations including Hedgebrook, a residency that supports visionary women writers to help achieve a just and peaceful world; the Ms. Foundation for Women, a public foundation building women’s collective power for social, economic and reproductive justice; and the Advancement Project, a multiracial civil rights organization dedicated to eliminating structural racism through high impact policy change. She also serves on the board of Maven, the largest independent media coalition in North America. A highly sought-after keynote speaker for colleges, Sen has spoken at Harvard, Brown, University of Michigan, Penn State, and was the Commencement Speaker at Antioch New England. She is a James O. Gibson Innovation Fellow at PolicyLink.

Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

You’re invited to join us for the seventh Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s readers are Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Bob Livingston, and Mary Helen Specht.

Founded in 2010 by Peg Alford Pursell, Why There Are Words is an award-winning literary reading series that takes place every second Thursday in the San Francisco Bay Area, and beginning in 2017, will take place at 5 more national locations: New York City, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Austin. Each reading event presents a range of writers, including those who have published books and those who haven’t. All writers share the criterion of excellence. The guiding idea behind the series is that good work is timeless and needs to be heard regardless of marketing or commercial concerns. If you’re interested in reading or would like more information, please contact Alison: wtawaustin@gmail.com.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of a memoir, two full-length poetry collections, and four chapbooks of poetry. Her novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War, has been named by Publisher’s Lunch/BuzzBooks as a book to watch. Her 2012 chapbook was one of two winners of the Red Ochre Press chapbook award, and her short fiction and poetry have been nominated for a storySouth Million Writers Award; the Pushcart Prize; and the Best of the Net compilation. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.

As a member of Austin’s legendary Lost Gonzo Band, Bob Livingston toured and recorded with such musical visionaries as Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Martin Murphey, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and many more. The singer-songwriter played an integral role in helping to create the music that first earned Austin the designation of “Live Music Capital of the World.” Traveling since the 80s as a Music Ambassador for the US State Department, he has taken Texas music as far afield as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Africa, Vietnam, and the Middle East, demonstrating again and again the unique power that music has to build bridges between peoples of the world. These tours earned him the honor of being appointed Ambassador of Goodwill by the State of Texas and Austin’s International Music Ambassador by the City of Austin. His last CD, Gypsy Alibi, released in 2011 on New Wilderness Records, won Album of the Year at the Texas Music Awards 2011, and he was inducted into Texas Music Legends Hall of Fame in 2016. While playing over 180 shows a year, he is also managing to write a memoir for Texas Tech Press, play with a multi-cultural band from Texas and India called Cowboys & Indians, and is in the final mix on a new album on Howlin’ Dog Records called Up The Flatland Stairs.

Mary Helen Specht‘s debut novel, Migratory Animals, was an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Austin American-Statesmen, an IndieNext Pick, and an Apple iBook selection. Migratory Animals also won the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Best Book of Fiction. A previous Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Fellow, she is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University. Texas Monthly has named her one of “Ten Writers to Watch.”

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Indictus by Natalie Eilbert.

Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus summons what cannot be said while finding a way to articulate, with ferocity and exuberance and a clear and brutal vision, the violence of misogynistic systems and cultures and the ways in which they devour and destroy their inhabitants. It’s not just that this book doesn’t waste words. It goes further than that. Each sound, line, breath is charged with an energy that is explosive. Indictus lays all its cards on the table so there are no doubts about just how high the stakes here are: “I didn’t mean to assemble my whole career on lies, so now I blast holes in the men.” Yet in this world of broken bodies, Eilbert’s tenacity, her sheer drive to get to the end of a thought, to get the words onto the page, conveys a demand: to be honest, to resist, to live. —Daniel Borzutzky

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us for a meet and greet with author Lacey Schmidt, hosted by the Sapphic Reading Group. Everyone is welcome!

By day, Dr. Lacey Schmidt is a “corporate” suit. She runs her own company, Minerva Work Solutions, and serves as the Executive Director for Faculty Development at the University of Houston. When she sheds her daytime persona, Lacey morphs into other roles: poet, artist, adventurer, and novelist. In the latter instance, she has published three LesFic romances with Affinity Rainbow Publications: A Walk Away, Catch to Release, and Playing With Matches. In addition, a drama/thriller, A Badge Washed Up, will be available Summer 2019. Lacey has also penned several short stories. Two romances, Love’s Luck and Peaches and Honey, are in anthologies published by Affinity. Lacey’s latest short story is a sci-fi adventure entitled A Lone Star. It’s part of The Lone Star Collection, an anthology which benefits LesFic literary events. Lacey is married and lives in Houston. She and Laura have several furry children: Oberon, the tabby terrorist, and his sidekick, Sabina, plus two couch-loving canines, Misha and Nakita. Playtime for Lacey involves doing barrel rolls in a T-38, swimming with barracudas in the Caribbean, and flying NASA’s shuttle simulator.

The Sapphic Reading Group of Austin, Texas, celebrates and promotes works of fiction by women that authentically express the historical, cultural, political, and interpersonal experiences of lesbians. The group serves as a forum for lovers of lesbian fiction to discuss good reads, exchange books, and share news concerning the LesFic literary community. We welcome readers, authors, editors, and publishers of lesbian fiction.

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 literary universe! 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 guest is Ken Fontenot.

Ken Fontenot is a poet and novelist who lives in Austin. He is author of four books of poetry, including In a Kingdom of Birds, which was named best book of poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters, and All My Animals and Stars, which won the Austin Book Award; and a novel, For Mr. Raindrinker. He has an MA in German from UT Austin and is currently putting together a book of his Collected Translations.

Join us in celebrating International Translation Day with a reading featuring renowned translators Marian Schwartz and Philip Boehm. Marian will be reading from her translation of Russian author Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands, and Philip will read from his translation of Polish author Hannah Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts, which won the Soeurette Diehl Fraser award for translation given by the Texas Institute of Letters.

Also worth noting: all our books in translation will be 20% OFF on September 30th, International Translation Day!

Join us in celebrating the launch of a new book of poetry, Five Friends on Sunday Afternoons. With readings from David Jewell, John Lee, Bill Jeffers, John McElhenney, and Lyman Grant (left to right, below).

David Jewell is a poet, storyteller, author, actor and stream of consciousness visionary imagineer who chronicles the 21st century mind and its many idiosyncrasies. He and his writing have appeared in two Richard Linklater movies, Before Sunrise and Waking Life, and he’s shared shows with Laurie Anderson and Leon Redbone. His books are time bombs already detonating in another generation and hIs bio says he was “born in blank and lives in and.”

John Lee is the national best-selling author of The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man and 20 other titles. He has taught Literature, Humanities, American Studies and Religious Studies at The University of Alabama, The University of Texas, Austin Community College, and Northeast Alabama Community College. While Lee is an internationally-recognized pioneer in The Men’s and Recovery Movements, thanks to his 22-year friendship and collaboration with the poet Robert Bly (audio On The Mountain of Tears and Laughter, poems by Robert Bly and John Lee), Lee has become a recognized poet in his own right giving readings in bookstores, online and at The Library of Congress. Lee has been published in several magazines and authored three chapbooks—Sleeping in Public, Too Much Talk and Too Little, and The Dragon’s Letters.

Bill Jeffers Has been writing words and reading them out loud in and around Austin for more than 40 years.

John McElhenney is an internationally recognized single-parent author and coach. His blog WholeParent.org has been syndicated widely and gets 15,000 reads a month. John lives in Austin, Texas with his two kids. Writer, coach, musician, tennis player, dad.

Lyman Grant teaches at Austin Community College as a adjunct online professor of English, Creative Writing, and Humanities. He also tutors and teaches at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is the author and editor of several books, including five volumes of poetry, the most recent being Old Men on Tuesday Mornings (Alamo Bay Press).

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

This month’s selection is Kenneth Fearing’s Clark Gifford’s Body, a paranoid tour de force of political noir.

Clark Gifford’s Body skips back and forth in time, interspersing newspaper clippings and court transcripts with the reactions of the politicians, generals, businessmen, waiters, journalists, and soldiers who double as the actors and the chorus in a drama over which, finally, they have no control. Who here is leading? Who is being led? Fearing’s novel is a pseudo-documentary of a world given over to pseudo-politics and pseudo-events, a prophetic glimpse of the future as a poisonous fog.

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

This month’s featured reader is Rachel Starnes, author of The War at Home.

At once a portrait of the devastating strains that military life puts on families and a meditation on what it means to be left behind, The War at Home is a brave portrait of a modern military family and the realities of separation, endurance, and love that overcomes.

“Rachel Starnes’s The War at Home navigates the joys, fears, compromises, and casualties that create the terrain of marriage. And if you are a military spouse, her memoir will reveal thoughts you never even knew you had. This is a wise and fearless book.” —Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone

Featured reader Rachel Starnes is author of The War at Home, a painful and funny memoir of life as a Navy wife. She earned her MFA at California State University, Fresno, and has published essays in The Colorado Review, Front Porch Journal, and O Magazine. She lives in Georgetown.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Yuki Tanaka’s poetry collection Séance in Daylight, winner of the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Featuring readings from Yuki, as well as Rachel Heng and Shangyang Fang.

Séance in Daylight is about desire, transformation, and dreams; it is also about intricate, yet light-footed sessions with the dead. The ever-present undertow of the poet’s sharp observations keeps these lush, yet lapidary lyrics from slipping into solipsism or sentimentality. ‘Back home, my body thin and healthy / cooling my feet on a crystal ball like a psychic out of business,’ says one speaker, returning from an imagined visitation. These poems remind us that at times, life’s very existence feels unbearably inexplicable, beautiful, perverse, moody, and touching. Yuki Tanaka connects these feelings with a spiritual intensity and a sweet wit. His images startle, ‘A bare white arm / disinfected. Plump, sizzling,’ and they pierce into our inwardness, ‘This pile of wood wished to be a stairway / but couldn’t. Will you pretend to climb it. —Sandra Lim

Yuki Tanaka is an MFA student at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. His chapbook Séance in Daylight was the winner of the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.

Rachel Heng’s debut novel, Suicide Club, will be translated in nine languages worldwide and has been featured as a most anticipated summer read by ELLE, Gizmodo, Bitch Media, The Rumpus, NYLON and The Irish Times. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and Prairie Schooner‘s Jane Geske Award, and has been published in Glimmer Train, The Offing, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Rachel is currently a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.

Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China. He majored in Civil Engineering as an undergrad. After knowing there is a higher employment rate in the field of poetry, he decided to pursue an MFA. He writes both in English and Chinese. Sometimes he writes poems first in Chinese to structure their skeletons, then translate them into English to add flesh and blood. He is now a poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.

Join us for an evening with poets Ellen Doré Watson and Abe Louise Young (left to right, below).

Ellen Doré Watson is the author of five full-length collections of poems, most recently, pray me stay eager, from Alice James Books. Earlier works include Dogged Hearts, from Tupelo Press, This Sharpening, also from Tupelo, and two from Alice James Books, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Watson’s journal appearances include APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated nine volumes from Brazilian Portuguese, most notably the poetry of Adélia Prado, including The Alphabet in the Park (Wesleyan University Press), Ex-Voto (Tupelo), and, most recently The Mystical Rose, from the UK poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books. Watson serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review and core faculty at Drew University’s Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Poetry and Translation.

Abe Louise Young is a believer in the power of words, generosity and vulnerability to make meaningful change. She’s the author of three chapbooks of poetry, Heaven to Me (Headmistress Press, 2017), Ammonite (Magnolia Press Collective, 2011), and Poem for a Friend Growing Lighter and Lighter (forthcoming Spring 2019 from Dancing Girl Press). She’s also the author or editor of numerous guides for educators, including the free guide Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your LGBTQ Students (Next Generation Press, 2011) and Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays and Vision from American Teenagers (Next Generation Press, 2005). She was nominated as Best Activist in Austin 2017 by the Austin Chronicle for her work mobilizing hundreds of people to prevent homelessness by building personal resource-sharing networks with families displaced by Hurricane Harvey, an effort called Hurricane Love. Young holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James Michener Fellow in Writing, an MA from Northwestern University and a BA from Smith College.

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 is a special edition—Political Science Professor Roy Casagranda will be launching his new novel, The Blood Throne of Caria.

Casagranda’s story is a bona fide page-turner that should have readers rooting for the tenacious Artemisia from beginning to end. A gripping, fast-paced adventure that delivers passionate writing. —Kirkus Reviews

The Blood Throne of Caria pushes back against the dominant misogynistic and racist portrayals of Artemisia I as a cruel and maniacal ruler. Casagranda reexamines the much-maligned queen to create an explicitly feminist portrait of ancient woman who must achieve to fulfill her ambitions and endure both familiar and extreme gender limits. Twenty-five centuries ago, the very mention of a woman’s name in public was taboo in Athens, yet despite this Artemisia assailed the ramparts of patriarchy to become one of the greatest rulers in human history.

Roy Casagranda got a GED and a BS in political science and went on to teach high school calculus, algebra, history, physics, and chemistry. Eventually he went back to school for a couple of graduate degrees and now teaches political science at a community college. Though he is obsessed with politics, he mostly hates it. And though he is obsessed with the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean he mostly loves it. Roy is especially interested in telling stories from the perspective of the loser, the forgotten, the unjustly villainized, and women with weapons.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us in celebrating the recent launch of Rachel Heng’s debut novel, Suicide Club: A Novel About Living. Featuring a reading from Rachel, as well as a Q & A hosted by Carrie Fountain.

Every month seems to bring some new health study promising an authoritative guide on how to get stronger, feel better, or live longer. Every month, we are left more confused than when we started. In Suicide Club: A Novel About Living, Heng’s characters live in a dystopian reality where immortality is possible, conforming to a shadowy health ministry is the new careerism, and no one seems to be happy. Along the lines of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Suicide Club takes place in a science fiction reality that feels more real than we would like to admit.

Rachel Heng’s debut novel, Suicide Club, will be translated in nine languages worldwide and has been featured as a most anticipated summer read by ELLE, Gizmodo, Bitch Media, The Rumpus, NYLON and The Irish Times. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and Prairie Schooner‘s Jane Geske Award, and has been published in Glimmer Train, The Offing, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Rachel is currently a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.

Join author Amber Elby to celebrate the release of her new novel, Double Double Toil, the sequel to Cauldron’s Bubble. Enjoy a reading and Q&A session with Amber and special guest Nori Rose, as they explore new twists on old tales.

Amber Elby was born in Grand Ledge, Michigan but spent much of her childhood in the United Kingdom. She began writing when she was three years old and created miniature books by asking her family how to spell every, single, word. Several years later, she saw her first Shakespearean comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, in London. Many years later, she studied Creative Writing at Michigan State University’s Honors College before earning her Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently resides in Texas with her husband and two daughters and spends her time teaching, traveling, and getting lost in imaginary worlds.

Nori Rose is a writer, poet, multimedia artist, Witch, and unabashed Scorpio who draws inspiration from both sides of the Veil. She graduated with honors from Austin Community College in 2014 with an Associate of Arts in Creative Writing, and earned a BA in English & Creative Writing from the University of Texas in 2017. While at UT, she participated in the Digital Storytelling Workshop and published two theses: a critical examination of human-animal interdependency in Life Of Pi (basically, she spent a year writing 60 pages on why the tiger is really a person) and a creative writing thesis which included an excerpt of her forthcoming novel, The Dreaming Hour. Her work has been published in The Rio Review, Feminine Inquiry, Musings of a #LonelyFeminist, Hothouse, and online in Gingerbread House Literary Magazine and Corvid Queen. Her poem “Sluts” was featured at the 2015 Art As Activism showcase hosted by the Gender & Sexuality Center at UT Austin, and her poetry has been incorporated into an improv dance showcase. She was a 2016 Writers in New York participant at New York University, has lead workshops on Professional Writing and Dark Fantasy to Austin-area youth, and is currently working with other Witches and creatives to produce a zine for the times we’re upon. When not writing, making art and dismantling the patriarchy, she reads Tarot, collects tattoos, and bakes things with flowers. An eighth generation Texan, she lives in the Austin area with her husband, two rescue cats, a rescue dog, and a blue tongue skink.

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 “Otherworldly Intrigues”… what in the WORLD do we have here? Our featured artists include: LARRY MAYFIELD, RG HOOK, TERESA Y ROBERSON, JOSH DAVIS, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows the featured artists. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

The Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin is a monthly get-together to dive into the depths of James Joyce’s greatest, weirdest, and most notorious masterpiece.

The process is to take turns reading aloud from the text, which allows its musicality to flow forth. Then we all discuss our interpretations and the many meanings and themes contained within the selection we’ve read.

We’ll read 2 or 3 pages of the book, depending on how many people are there and how much time we spend discussing the content.

This event is FREE and open to everyone. NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Joyce or Finnegans Wake is required, just have an open mind—and be prepared to read aloud in front of strangers.

For more information, please visit the reading group’s website.

A representation of the book’s structure by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Join us for an evening with visiting poet Valerie Wallace, who will be reading from her collection House of McQueen, released in March of this year. Valerie will be joined by Simone Muench and Katy Chrisler.

Selected by Vievee Francis for the Four Way Books Intro Prize, Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen is a glittering debut by an assured new voice. Inhabiting the life and work of Alexander McQueen, Wallace builds a fantastical world using both original language and excerpts drawn from interviews, supermodels, Shakespeare, and more. At turns fierce and vulnerable, here is a collection that leaps from runway to fairytale to street with wild, brilliant grace.

Wallace conducts a literary seance in her transcendent debut, serving as a scholar of and medium for the late iconic fashion designer Alexander McQueen (1969–2010). Devising her poems using an extensive array of sources, Wallace manages to encapsulate the “monstrous and magical” visions that defined McQueen’s oeuvre. —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Valerie Wallace is the author of House of McQueen (Four Way Books, 2018) and the chapbook The Dictators’ Guide to Good Housekeeping (dancing girl press, 2011). Her work was chosen by Margaret Atwood for the 2012 Atty Award, and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Award in Poetry. Her work has been supported by various grants and fellowships. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Associate Director, Communications for the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago and teaches at Harold Washington College, the Newberry Library, and offers private workshops.

Simone Muench is the author of several books including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her recent, Suture, is a book of sonnets written with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence, 2017). She and Dean also edited They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (BLP, 2018). She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and the Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, and is professor of English at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. She serves as a poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, the chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, and the organizer (with Beth McDermott) of the Danny’s Sunday Series.

Katy Chrisler received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held residencies with Land Arts of the American West and 100 West Corsicana. Recent work of hers has appeared in Tin House, Conflict of Interest, The Volta, The Seattle Review and Black Warrior Review. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

BREAK FREE … and share words with us. Join us for an evening of enlightenment when Louisiana poets Bessie Senette and Clare L. Martin and Austin poet Robert Okaji share their work.

Louisiana native Bessie Senette has published her first book, Cutting the Clouds, a Bayou Mystic’s Poems, Musings, and Imaginings. Currently, she is finalizing Louisiana Pines, a chapbook manuscript. Senette is an author, healer, public speaker, and ordained interfaith minister. In September of 2018, she served as Artistic Director and featured performer of a multi-disciplined arts event celebrating the Sufi poet Rumi. Senette lives in Lafayette, Louisiana with her husband of 35 years. She has two sons, two daughters-in-law, four grand-pups and one cantankerous grand-cat.

The author of five chapbook collections, two micro-chapbooks and a mini-digital chapbook, Robert Okaji writes in his backyard shack in Texas. He once won a goat-catching contest, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slippery Elm, Vox Populi, Panoply, Hamilton Stone Review, The New Reader and elsewhere.

Join us for an afternoon with authors A. R. Ashworth, K. P. Gresham, andHelen Currie Foster. All three will be sharing excerpts from recent novels.

A. R. Ashworth earned a degree in history and worked for over twenty years in high tech. Along the way he developed a lasting love for London, dark British-style mysteries and Scandinavian noir. Souls of Men, the first novel of the Elaine Hope series, was released in April 2017. Two Faced, the second Elaine Hope novel, was released in July 2018.

K.P. Gresham, author of the Pastor Matt Hayden Mystery series and Three Days at Wrigley Field, moved to Texas as quick as she could. Born Chicagoan, K.P. and her husband moved to Texas, fell in love with not shoveling snow and are 30+ year Lone Star State residents. She finds that her dual country citizenship, the Midwest and Texas, provide deep fodder for her award-winning novels. Her varied careers as a media librarian and technical director, middle school literature teacher and theatre playwright and director add humor and truth to her stories. A graduate of Houston’s Rice University Novels Writing Colloquium, K.P. now resides in Austin, Texas, where life with her tolerant but supportive husband and narcissistic Chihuahua is acceptably weird.

Helen Currie Foster writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series. She earned a BA from Wellesley College, an MA from the University of Texas, and a JD from the University of Michigan. Having grown up in Texas surrounded by books and storytelling, Foster taught high school English and covered politics and wrote features (prize-winning) for a weekly newspaper. After practicing law for more than thirty years as an environmental lawyer, she found the character Alice and her stories had suddenly appeared in her life. Married with two children, Foster lives north of Dripping Springs, Texas, supervised by three burros. She’s deeply curious about human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Foster works in Austin and is active with Hays County Master Naturalists and Austin Shakespeare. She currently serves as president of the local Heart of Texas chapter of the national organization Sisters in Crime. Foster enjoys meeting with readers in book groups and libraries in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.

We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is Pei Pei the Monkey King by Wawa.

Pei Pei the Monkey King, Wawa’s first book, is a playful book about painful subjects in contemporary Hong Kong, namely the Umbrella Revolution of 2014, the Fishball Revolution of 2016 and an on-going epidemic of suicides among young people. The author, who has recently moved to Honolulu, knows internal and external exile. The translator, Henry Wei Leung, has written a clear and perceptive introduction to the language and politics of Hong Kong. He also addresses the difficulties in translating Chinese poetry into English, noting that even people who speak ‘Chinese’ can often not understand each other. The book ends with an interview between poet and translator that elucidates the book’s private concerns.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!

Join us in celebrating the launch of Alisar Eido’s new novel, Night Bound. With readings from Alisar, as well as Victoria Champion and Brennan Utley.

Alisar Eido is an Austin author whose work spans multiple genres from psychological thrillers to dark fantasy. Her new release, Night Bound, is book two of three in The Soulfire Series. The author’s inspiration stems from her many experiences with strange coincidences and unexplainable events.

Brennan Utley is an emerging author based in Austin who blends realist, fabulist, science fiction, and satirical traditions into his unique and often darkly funny stories and aspiring novels. He is currently working late into the night on a handful of new projects and teaches in Bastrop, Texas.

Victoria Champion is an author of dark fiction, horror, and dark fantasy. She met Alisar while in a Creative Writing class while pursuing her Creative Writing degree. She has published multiple short stories and a novel, Zombie Flood: Disaster of the Dead.

Join Bat City Review and Malvern Books for SILKEN SAD UNCERTAIN: A Haunted Reading & Open Mic! Featuring Daniel Eduardo Ruiz, Michelle Dominique Burk, KING MTN, Sarah Matthes, and others. Bring your spookiest poems and ghost stories for an all-ages open mic.

Costumes highly encouraged.

Join us for an evening with Danielle Sellers (left) and Traci Brimhall (right).

Danielle Sellers’ poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, The Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Bone Key Elegies (Main Street Rag 2009) and The Minor Territories (Sundress publications 2018). She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.

Traci Brimhall is the author of Saudade (Copper Canyon), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), as well as the forthcoming Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon). She’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted (on most occasions) by Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

This month’s selection is The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns, an enthralling and macabre fairy tale.

Through her reimagining of the wicked stepmother figure, Comyns speculates convincingly as to how damage escalates despite all conscious attempts to limit itself. —Helen Oyeyemi

Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful … there’s also something uniquely original about her voice. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius. —The Observer

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of A High Wind in Jamaica and by the end of this year over 400 titles will be in print—so we have plenty of excellent reading material to choose from. The series includes nineteenth-century and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, established classics and cult favorites, and literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. Literature in translation also constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, including new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well as fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, among others.

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or specific passage to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you to discuss a NYRB classic!

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

This month’s Novel Night will be an evening of suspense, with readings from mystery writers Manning Wolfe, Billy Kring, and Mark Pryor.

Manning Wolfe, an award-winning author and attorney residing in Austin, Texas, writes cinematic-style, smart, fast-paced thrillers with a salting of Texas bullshit. Her series features Austin Lawyer Merit Bridges. As a graduate of Rice University and the University of Texas School of Law, Manning’s experience has given her a voyeur’s peak into some shady characters’ lives and a front row seat to watch the good people who stand against them.

Billy Kring is a writer and actor, and in another life, he was a Border Patrol Agent and a consultant on terrorism and international border issues. He has worked in Mexico, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pan Pacific. He is an eight-generation Texan, and lives in a small town in southwest Texas, an hour from the Mexican border, so it’s close enough to visit when he feels the need.

Mark Pryor is a former newspaper reporter from England, and now a prosecutor with the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the Hugo Marston mystery series, set in Paris, London, and Barcelona. The most recent is The Sorbonne Affair, a “flawlessly constructed whodunit,” according to Booklist. His previous novel in the series was The Paris Librarian, which the Toronto Globe & Mail says “has it all… a finely structured plot that’s one of Pryor’s best books yet.” The first Hugo Marston novel, The Bookseller, was a Library Journal Debut of the Month, and called “unputdownable” by Oprah.com, and the series has been featured in the New York Times. Mark is also the author of the psychological thriller, Hollow Man, and its sequel, Dominic, published in January of 2018. He also created the nationally-recognized true-crime blog D.A. Confidential. As a prosecutor, he has appeared on CBS News’s 48 Hours and Discovery Channel’s Discovery ID: Cold Blood.

Join us for an evening with acclaimed poets Diane Seuss and John Fry.

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, was released in 2018 by Graywolf Press. Four-Legged Girl, published in 2015 by Graywolf Press, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open won the Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Seuss was raised in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador. Please visit Austin Book Club for more information.

Join us for an evening with Kathleen Winter, Mong-Lan, and Jess Smith (left to right, below).

Kathleen Winter is the author of two poetry collections, I will not kick my friends (2018), which won the Elixir Poetry Prize, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, winner of the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, The New Statesman, Agni, New Republic, Poetry London, The Texas Observer, Gulf Coast, and other journals. Winter was granted fellowships at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Dobie Paisano Ranch, Dora Maar House, James Merrill House and Cill Rialaig Project. She grew up in Texas and teaches writing at Sonoma State in Northern California.

Mong-Lan celebrates the publication of her new book of poems and artwork, Dusk Aflame: poems & art; her new chapbook, Tone of Water in a Half-Filled Glass; and her new tango CD, Perfumas de Amor, de Argentina y Viet Nam (Tango por Siempre). Writer, former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and Fulbright Scholar, Mong-Lan has published seven books of poetry and artwork and three chapbooks, and has won prizes such as the Juniper Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards, among others. Frequently anthologized in the Best American Poetry Anthology, she has finished a novel, with an excerpt in the North American Review. A former college professor with the University of Maryland in Tokyo, she left her native Viet Nam on the last day of the evacuation of Sai Gon. Also a musician and composer, she has released ten albums of jazz piano and tangos, which showcase her poetry. As a visual artist, her artwork has been exhibited in galleries in the US, in museums such as the Dallas Museum of Art, and in public exhibitions in Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Bali, and Buenos Aires. Mong-Lan as a dancer has studied ballet, jazz, and flamenco, and has specialized as a tango dancer, performer, and teacher, having over twenty years of tango dance experience, in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, New York City, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hanoi, and elsewhere. Mong-Lan’s new solo show, “Ocean of Senses: Dream Songs & Tangos—one woman’s journey from Sai Gon to Buenos Aires, via America,” blends original poetry, jazz piano, guitar, dance, story, and song.

Jess Smith is currently pursuing a PhD in English at Texas Tech University, where she curates the LHUCA Literary Series. Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, Waxwing, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, and other journals. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center.