Malvern Books

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!

“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.

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

This special edition of the Lion & the Pirate also features a reading from poet Mel Finefrock, who will be sharing her collection, Patchwork Poetry, and other poems. The Open Mic will be at 1pm, followed by Mel’s reading at 2pm.

Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities. Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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 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!

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

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

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.

“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.

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.

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!

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. And this month we’ll also be announcing the winners of our annual Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest! Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.

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

“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.

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 Gogi Hale.

Gogi Hale is President of the Board for Kallisto Gaia Press. She is a member of the Writers’ League of Texas (WLT), Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and 2016 Finalist for the SCBWI Cynthia Leitich-Smith Mentoring Award. Active in the writing community, Gogi volunteers for the WLT, and continues her education through Austin Community College, WLT courses, workshops and in-depth study at The Writing Barn. She has hosted a weekly writing critique group for the past four years. Writer of fiction, both short and long form, Gogi is deep at work on a thriller and a YA road trip novel. One of her proudest moments was when a fellow writer read her work and said, “Sometimes you scare me.” Her short story, “The Choosing,” was recently published in the horror journal, Jitterpress #7. When not working on scary stories, Gogi loves to travel and cook. Lately, she has been experiencing the challenge of boiling lots and lots of water.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the English translation of local Iranian poet Roja Chamankar’s poetry collection, Dying in a Mother Tongue, translated by Blake Atwood (UT Press).

Born in Borazjan in southern Iran in 1981, Roja Chamankar is a poet and filmmaker with an academic background in Dramatic Literature and Cinematography. She has published nine books of poetry in Iran, co-written three books for children, and translated two collection of poems from French into Persian. Her works have been translated into several other languages and have won a number of national and international awards, including the Greek Nikos Gatsos prize in 2016. Roja has participated in numerous poetry readings and festivals in Iran, France, Sweden, Austria, Malta, and the United States. A collection of her poems titled Dying in A Mother Tongue, translated by Blake Atwood, will be published in November 2018 by the University of Texas Press. She is currently residing in Austin, Texas.

Blake Atwood is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic.

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 Sara Bawany’s (W)holehearted: A collection of poetry and prose. Hosted by CAIR-Austin.

Sara Bawany is a social worker, a writer, and a poet with a passion for bringing to light some of the most taboo issues in the South Asian community. A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, Sara received her Master’s degree in Social Work and her Bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Islamic Studies. She currently serves as a social worker at the Muslim Community Center for Human Services, providing free mental health counseling and mental health education to the community. She has been writing since she was very young and she recently published her first poetry book. Some of the themes you can find in her work include femininity, spirituality, social justice issues, identity, mental health, and domestic violence. When she is not writing or working, you can find her baking cookies, traveling somewhere new, or cuddling with her two pet rabbits.

Join us for a meet and greet with authors Jaycie Morrison and Barbara Ann Wright, hosted by the Sapphic Reading Group. Everyone is welcome!

Jaycie Morrison is a second generation native Dallasite who is also in love with Colorado and now splits her time between the two. She lives with her wife of over two decades and their spoiled dog. As a youngster, Jaycie and her friends entertained themselves making up and acting out stories featuring characters from popular TV shows or favorite bands. As a voracious reader, she always wondered what it would be like to write a book. Once she started, it was almost impossible to stop. Jaycie’s debut novel, Basic Training of the Heart, (Bold Strokes Books, fall, 2016) and its sequel, Heart’s Orders (2017), are the first two in a series that combine her love of the written word and her fascination with history. “Weather or Not,” in The Lone Star Collection, is her first short story.

Barbara Ann Wright pens fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories when not adding to her enormous book collection or ranting on her blog. She says that her writing career can be boiled down to two points: when her mother bought her a typewriter in the sixth grade, and when she took second place in the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing in 2004. One gave her the means to write and the other gave her the confidence to keep going. Believing in oneself, in her opinion, is the most important thing a person can do. Barbara’s short fiction has appeared twice in Crossed Genres Magazine and once made Tangent Online’s recommended reading list. She’s published ten novels with Bold Strokes Books. Her first novel, The Pyramid Waltz, was one of Tor.com’s “Reviewer’s Choice” books. It was also a “Foreword Review Book of the Year” award finalist, as well as a GCLS Goldie finalist. In addition, The Pyramid Waltz won the 2013 Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Fantasy and made Book Riot’s “100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors.” Barbara has been the recipient of four other Rainbow Awards, and her novel, Coils, was a finalist in the 2017 Lambda Awards. Her latest novel is The Tattered Lands. Barbara lives in the Austin area with a small army of pets, and she’s not afraid to sic them on her critics.

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 in celebrating the launch of Texas State University MFA professor Steve Wilson’s new poetry collection. With readings and book signings from Steve and fellow Finishing Line Press and MFA poetry graduate Prudence Arceneaux.

Steve Wilson’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide. He is the author of four collections of poetry, and editor of The Anatomy of Water: A Sampling of Contemporary American Prose Poetry. He teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who has taught English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX, since 1998. She earned a BA in English/ Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, but even before finishing the degree realized “there’s no place like home.” Upon her return to Texas, she began work on an MFA in Creative Writing, which she received from the University-formerly-known-as-Southwest-Texas-State in 1998. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, New Texas, Clark Street Review, and Inkwell. Her chapbook, Dirt, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017.

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

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 Ending Up by Kingsley Amis.

Ending Up is a grimly hilarious dance of death, full of bickering, bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts. It is a book about dying people and about a dying England, clinging to its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay.

“Ending Up is a sardonic little masterpiece which, with incredible economy and stylistic restraint, shows what old age is really like, and also—far, far better than any other writer I know—what contemporary England is like.”

—Anthony Burgess

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 Austin launch of Isabella Ides’ White Monkey Chronicles.

A rogue order of nuns are raising an undocumented deity on the down-low in this contemporary fable. Expect a plague of Cardinals. A feminist insurgency. And divine monkeyshines.

Born under the Hollywood Sign, Isabella was abducted by life, packed in a suitcase and dropped off in Texas. She launched as a poet in Austin, then a playwright in Dallas. Now with the launch of White Monkey Chronicles, she is relishing her latest reincarnation as a novelist.

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

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

Join us in celebrating the release of the Fall 2018 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review. Students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with us.

“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 over 25 nationally recognized Texas poets as they read their work from the 2019 Texas Poetry Calendar and celebrate the 21st Edition of this iconic journal / planner / calendar.

Featured poets include Christine Boldt, Hugh Burke, Sandra Cobb, Diana Conces, Chip Dameron, Charles Darnell, Terry Dawson, Nancy Fierstien, Christine Gilbert, Amy Greenspan, Barbara Gregg, Laura Guli, Betsy Joseph, Carie Juettner, Lauren Kinzie, Kimberley Lambright, Jim LaVilla-Havelin, Wade Martin, Robert Okaji, Frank Pool, Tina Posner, Margi McCreless Roe, Carol Coffee Reposa, Shubh Schiesser, Mary Louise Shack, Rie Sheridan Rose, Jan Spence, Dee Susong, Claire Vogel-Camargo, Christine Wenk-Harrison, Allyson Whipple, Steve Wilson, with 2019 Calendar editor, Cindy Huyser and Kallisto Gaia Press managing editor, Tony Burnett.

This event is supported in part by the city of Austin Economic Development Department Cultural Arts Division.

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 Cecily Parks (at right).

Featured reader Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O’Nights, and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. She teaches at Texas State University.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Vanessa Couto Johnson’s first full-length poetry collection, Pungent dins concentric (Tolsun Books).

Pungent dins concentric . . . is bounteous and exhilarating, even as it aces the heavy lifting of the book’s real and often startling wisdom. In the delectable world of these poems, “the properties of bellies are what lead us” in a “life, not fare, but air-letting. We all lung for.” With lightning quick “voracity veracity velocity” this book invites us to “laugh until full, until body itself is a world.” “Elegant in the mathematical sense,” wry but confident pronouncements amount to a love song to the pleasure and puzzlement of sentient sensuality, onomatopoetically delivering the very delight and savor these “polylingual spoon nutrients, crave and carve and cave of / deepening morphemes” describe.
—Susan Lewis

Propelled by extraordinary imaginative force, the poems of Vanessa Couto Johnson’s dazzling pungent dins concentric unfold in a sequence of evocations, each one summoning into view a moment of bustle in a specific but overloaded social space. The works are built of sentences, swirling syntactic image structures that seem to be the outcome of critical attention to the strangeness of the world around us. Linguistic wit and sassy irreverence partially veil Johnson’s dismay, but they cannot veil the poet’s ebullient joie de vivre.
—Lyn Hejinian

Vanessa Couto Johnson has written a tantalizing book, full of quick moves, wild associations, and linguistic flair. In pungent dins concentric, our world of dailiness is in considerable disarray: language calls out differences: seams don’t quite match and words lose their constancy (“I said celibate, not celebrate,” “no wrestling matte today.”) With meaning unstuck and liberty to disconnect or form new connections, the poems arrive at new truths, moments of hilarity and insight.
—Maxine Chernoff

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s first full-length book is pungent dins concentric (Tolsun Books, 2018). “Try the yen relish,” a sixteen-page prose poem sequence, was released in a first BoxSet from Oxidant | Engine in March 2018. Her chapbooks are speech rinse, winner of Slope Editions’ 2016 Chapbook Contest; rotoscoping collage in Cork City (dancing girl press, 2016); and Life of Francis, winner of Gambling the Aisle’s 2014 Chapbook Contest. Softblow, Thrush, Field, Blackbird, Cheat River Review, Cream City Review, and other journals and anthologies have featured her poetry. Most recently, four constraint-based erasure poems appeared in Surrealists and Outsiders 2018: I Wagered Deep On the Run of Six Rats to See Which Would Catch the First Fire (Thrice Publishing). A Brazilian born in Texas (dual citizen) and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is currently a Lecturer at Texas State University, where she earned her MFA.

Join us for an afternoon with Dorothy Ellis Barnett, who will read from her poetry and short stories.

Dorothy Ellis Barnett landed in Austin, Texas after a hardscrabble childhood growing up on the riverbeds, campgrounds and roads of the Southwest. While at The University of Texas she obtained a B.A. in Anthropology, an M.A. in English and was awarded a James A. Michener Fellowship. Together with her Fellows, she founded Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, then went on to launch The Rio Review and Poetry at Round Top, leaving over 50 literary journals in print along the literary highway. These publications have promoted, encouraged, and inspired countless writers and artists. Dorothy subsequently earned her M.F.A. from Pacific Lutheran University. She is now Professor Emerita at Austin Community College where she founded and created the Creative Writing Department. She is a former Board Member of the Writers’ League of Texas and is currently on the organizational committee for Poetry at Round Top held at Festival Hill each Spring. While her path has left a legacy for the literary community that includes her own publications, it pales in comparison to her role as wife, mother, grandmother and friend.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Love&Wages, Jim Trainer’s fifth full-length collection of poetry and prose through Yellow Lark Press. With host Dave Julian and featured readers Nathan Hamilton, Christia Madacsi Hoffman, and Nicole Brissette.

Jim Trainer (above) publishes one collection of poetry and prose every year through Yellow Lark Press. Love&Wages is his 5th. He’s also a singer-songwriter, journalist and curator of Going For The Throat—a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance. Please visit his website for Love&Wages, his latest collection, and for music, film, and appearances. (Photo credit: Adam Glick Photography.)

Host Dave Julian, aka The Poetic Butcher was born and raised in the Big N.O. (Old New Orleans, Louisiana). He moved to Lexington, Kentucky a few days after Hurricane Katrina to live with his mother and stepfather. This formerly was his home aside from some occasional adventures, perhaps most notably his time in The Land of the Rising Sun, Japan. Now he resides in Austin, Texas.

Featured reader Nathan Hamilton (below, left) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Austin, Texas. As a singer/songwriter he has been performing professionally for more than 20 years. During that time he has released six albums on his own and two as a member of the Good Medicine Band (aka Sharecroppers). He was a winner of the 2000 Kerrville New Folk Award and a Top 5 Finalist in the 2008 Independent Music Awards. Nathan has toured internationally and in 2012 was selected as one of the official City of Austin Music Ambassadors to Oita, Japan as part of the Sister Cities Program. Nathan is a studied visual artist as well and has shown work in both group and solo shows. He employs a raw and loose-handed aesthetic along with a recycling sensibility. Using old doors, boards, dirt, rope, sticks, house paint, stones and other salvaged materials, Nathan turns these crudely textural elements into assemblages and paintings that take on a rough-hewn and contemplative elegance.

Featured reader Christia Madacsi Hoffman (below, center) grew up along the banks of the Mystic River in Mystic, Connecticut. Through her Austin-based company, CenterLight Media, Hoffman works as a marketing and editorial writer, graphic designer, and actor. Her early career adventures included antique furniture restoration and leading treks in the high Himalaya. With an accessible and insightful poetic voice, Hoffman’s poetry explores the universal themes of place, beauty, youth, and family. Her personal reflections reveal the depth in our everyday experiences and the significance of our intentions.

Featured reader Nicole Brissette (below, right) has a BFA in English. Her writing can be found in Austin Artmosphere Artists, Art World, and at Sybiljournal.com.

Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler.

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

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 The Happy End / All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre.

The Happy End / All Welcome is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants… At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.

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 from The Lumberjack’s Dove—and a shadow puppet crankie show—with visiting writer GennaRose Nethercott, and with special guest Sean Petrie.

In the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing, time and memory, and—finally—considering the act of storytelling itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,” Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled, sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.” Inflected with the uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly shifting of points-of-view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.

GennaRose Nethercott’s book The Lumberjack’s Dove was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series for 2017. She is also the lyricist behind the narrative song collection Modern Ballads, and is a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including BOMB, The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and PANK, and she has been a writer-in-residence at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, Art Farm Nebraska, and The Vermont Studio Center, among others. A born Vermonter, she tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter.

Sean Petrie is a founding member of “Typewriter Rodeo,” whose poetry book came out earlier this year. He has 6 short books coming out in 2019 as part of Fountas & Pinnell’s “Leveled Books” series. He also teaches legal writing at UT, and thinks Buffy is the best show ever.

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 Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig.

Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the nouveau roman with psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.

 

“Celebrated in Canada as a feminist classic, Weinzweig’s searing 1980 novel captures a woman’s awakening to her lover’s exploitation….Weinzweig’s prose style is sharp, particularly her dialogue: strange and surprising, it knocks every character interaction askew.”
—Publishers Weekly

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!

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

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

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

Join us in celebrating the release of All That is Evident is Suspect, the first collection in English to offer a life-size picture of the OuLiPo in its historical and contemporary incarnations. Featuring a reading from Daniel Levin Becker (below, right).

Since its inception in Paris in 1960, the OuLiPo—ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature—has continually expanded our sense of what writing can do. It’s produced, among many other marvels, a detective novel without the letter e (and a sequel of sorts without a, i, o, u, or y); an epic poem structured by the Parisian métro system; a story in the form of a tarot reading; a poetry book in the form of a game of go; and a suite of sonnets that would take almost 200 million years to read completely.

Lovers of literature are likely familiar with the novels of the best-known Oulipians—Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau—and perhaps even the small number of texts available in English on the group, including Warren Motte’s Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature and Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. But the actual work of the group in its full, radiant collectivity has never before been showcased in English. (“The State of Constraint,” a dossier in issue 22 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, comes closest.)

Enter All That is Evident is Suspect, the first collection in any language to represent all of its members (numbering 41 as of April 2018 ). Combining fiction, poetry, essays and lectures, and never-published internal correspondence—along with the acrobatically constrained writing and complexly structured narratives that have become synonymous with oulipian practice—this volume shows a unique group of thinkers and artists at work and at play, meditating on and subverting the facts of life, love, and the group itself. It’s an unprecedentedly intimate and comprehensive glimpse at the breadth and diversity of one of world literature’s most vital, adventurous presences.

Daniel Levin Becker is an American critic, editor, and translator who joined the Oulipo in 2009. He is the author of a book about the Oulipo, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, and has translated work by Georges Perec, Éric Chevillard, Thomas Clerc, and Paul Griffiths among others.

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 Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon.

The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book,  Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust  deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates death—how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. 

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 an evening with Tatiana Ryckman and Adeena Reitberger.

Tatiana Ryckman (left) is the author of the novella, I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) and two chapbooks of prose. She is the editor of Awst Press and has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, Arthub, and 100W. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Lithub, Paper Darts, Barrelhouse, and other publications. Tatiana can be found on airplanes or at tatianaryckman.com.

Adeena Reitberger’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in Black Warrior Review, Mississippi Review, Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Third Coast, NANO Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sierra Nevada Review, and other magazines, and her work has been listed as notable in the Best American Series. She teaches creative writing at Austin Community College and works the editor of American Short Fiction.

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 Anna Seghers’s Transit, an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.

On its own, this story is an important untold story of the refugee situation in Second World War-era Europe, but in its own grappling with its allegorical nature, Segher transforms the book into a masterpiece. Seghers balances these two impulses in telling her story with an existential, theological layer. The situation of these refugees mimics the course of the human soul. —Vol 1.Brooklyn

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!

In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities. And it’s our 5th birthday, so be ready to celebrate!

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

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

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 Sasha West.

Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, West Branch, Southern Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship, Inprint’s Verlaine Prize, Rice University’s Parks Fellowship, and a Houston Arts Alliance grant. 

Join us in celebrating the launch of the fourth 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.

Featured reader Cynthia White (above right), winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize, will be flying in from Santa Cruz to share her poetry! Other readers include Diana Conces, Charles Darnell, Terry Dawson, Geoffrey Hall, Bobby Horecka, and Frank Pool, among others to be announced.

Cynthia White (Santa Cruz CA) has poems appearing in Poet Lore, ZYZZYVA, New Letters and CALYX, among others. She’s been both finalist and semi-finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize.

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 Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful—the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

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!

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! The theme of this month’s reading is “Walk on the Wild Side,” and the readers are Tomás Q. Morín, Carrie Fountain, Sarah Bird, and Eliza Gilkyson (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.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and with Mari L’Esperance co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He is at work on a memoir about fathers. He teaches at Drew University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and The New Yorker, among others. Her debut collection, Burn Lake, was a National Poetry Series winner and was published in 2010 by Penguin. Her second collection, Instant Winner, was published by Penguin in 2014. Fountain’s debut novel, I’m Not Missing, was published in July, 2018 by Flatiron Books (Macmillan). Born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico, Fountain received her MFA as a fellow at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Currently writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University and Visiting Professor at the Michener Center, she is the host of NPR’s This Is Just to Say, a radio show and podcast where she has intimate conversations with America’s most influential poets. Fountain lives in Austin with her husband, playwright and novelist Kirk Lynn, and their two children.

Sarah Bird is the author of nine novels and one book of non-fiction. Her latest novel, Above the East China Sea, was long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award; was an ALEX Award nominee; winner of the 2016 Texas Philosophical Society Literary Award; a Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice; a Seattle Times Best Book of the Year; a Tucson Book Festival Great Books for Book Club selection; and a Marie Claire Best Summer Reads. Sarah has been an NPR Moth Radio Hour storyteller, and a writer for Oprah’s Magazine and the NY Times Sunday Magazine. During her ten-year screenwriting career, Sarah was hired to write for Paramount, CBS, Warner Bros, National Geographic, ABC, TNT, as well as several independent producers. Her latest novel, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, inspired by the true story of Cathy/Cathay Williams, the only woman to serve with the fabled Buffalo Soldiers and the first woman to enlist in the peacetime U.S. Army, has been selected to be a lead Fall 2018 title.

Eliza Gilkyson is a twice Grammy-nominated (2006/2015) singer songwriter and activist who is one of the most respected musicians in Folk, Roots and Americana circles. Her songs have been covered by Joan Baez, Bob Geldof, Tom Rush and Rosanne Cash and have appeared in films, PBS specials and on prime-time TV. A member of the Austin Music Hall of Fame, and a recent inductee into the Austin Songwriter Hall of Fame, she has won countless Folk Alliance and Austin Music awards, including 2014’s Songwriter of the Year. Eliza’s music has always offered a vivid reflection of the times we live in, full of joys and sorrows, each song a window into a life of struggle and triumph in a world she feels is “poised on the edge of moral, economic and environmental bankruptcy.” Her new CD released in summer 2018 from Red House Records, is titled Secularia.

Join us for something rather special: Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department will be introducing us to the two winners of their 2017 Balcones Prize. Alessandra Lynch will read from her poetry collection, Daylily Called it a Dangerous Moment, and Brian Van Reet will read from his novel, Spoils. Sponsored by the Creative Writing Department. This event is free and open to the public.

Alessandra Lynch’s latest book is Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment. She has received several fellowships, including residencies at Yaddo and the Macdowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Currently, she is poet-in-residence at Butler University.

Brian Van Reet is the author of Spoils, a novel that was named one of the best books of 2017 by the Guardian, Military Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others. He lives in Austin and has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters short story award.

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 Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.

Alexander Pushkin’s short novel is set during the reign of Catherine the Great, when the Cossacks rose up in rebellion against the Russian empress. Presented as the memoir of Pyotr Grinyov, a nobleman, The Captain’s Daughter tells how, as a feckless youth and fledgling officer, Grinyov was sent from St. Petersburg to serve in faraway southern Russia. At once a fairy tale and a thrilling historical novel, this singularly Russian work of the imagination is also a timeless, universal, and very winning story of how love and duty can summon pluck and luck to confront calamity.

The Captain’s Daughter is one of the stories in which Pushkin created Russian prose…. It is true poet’s prose, absolutely clear, objective, unpretentious and penetrating.
—The Spectator

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!

VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities) invite you to a very special edition of the Lion and Pirate Unplugged Open Mic. As well as our regular Open Mic event for performers of all ages and abilities, this month we are delighted to have a special guest, Elizabeth L. Sammons, who will share with us her debut novel, The Lyra and the Cross.

Friendship, forgiveness and faith set the groundwork of The Lyra and the Cross, a historical novel depicting the political and spiritual unrest in the first-century Roman Empire. Drawing on five years of historical research and on her own cross-cultural experience as journalist, Peace Corps volunteer and interpreter, Ohio author Elizabeth Sammons depicts a world as full of interfaith conflict and difficult choices as our own. Amidst familiar characters from the New Testament, readers will find stories of a slave turned freedman, a Greek orphan adopted into life as a Jew and two bittersweet love stories set against a background of cross-cultural conflict comparable to events we witness in the 21st century.

Elizabeth L. Sammons is a two-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Artists with Disability Access Program Award. She lives in Worthington, Ohio, holds an M.A. in journalism from Ohio State University, and has lived in five foreign countries. Her love of both scripture and Greek mythology dates back to childhood. To her knowledge, this is the only modern English-language novel featuring St. Stephen as its protagonist.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

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 Jennine “Doc” Krueger, a poet and playwright who graduated from Huston-Tillotson University in Austin and, having earned advanced degrees, now teaches English and Creative Writing at her alma mater. With influences from slam and hip hop, she has won five awards from the National Poetry Slam and her play “The Coven” was recently produced for Frontera Fest Fringe Festival.

Join us in celebrating the release of Larry Mayfield’s second collection, Tributaries and Stepping Stones. Readers include Larry and special guests Teresa Y Roberson, Spirit Thom, Arden Knight, and Gia Scott-Heron. Reed Mayfield, a featured artist in the book, will also attend.

Tributaries and Stepping Stones is a book of free verse poetry, poetic prose, spoken word, and word flow for dreamers. The varied contents includes subjects on love, family, Daoist/Zen principles, nature, and the environment.

Join us in celebrating the launch of mónica teresa ortiz’s new chapbook of crónicas, autobiography of a semi romantic anarchist (Host Publications).

I was really influenced by Eduardo Galeano’s work and then began reading Cameroon scholar Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. The cronicas reflect my exploration of necropolitics, of the state and sovereignty, of trying to exist and survive in a space where queerness is a disruption, against heteronormativity, against heterosexuality, against whiteness, against the state which controls our lives, even what happens to our bodies after we die. I think it hinges on the concept of an afterlife. When I came out to my parents, the person that they knew me to be, no longer existed. I was treated as if I had died. I began thinking, is my queerness my afterlife? Is it a rebirth?

This is how I perceive queer futurity. As Jose Esteban Muñoz says, it is imagining a future that doesn’t exist yet.

We live in a colonized space under capitalism. Our lives and deaths happen within these parameters. The settler colonial state attempts to control how we experience love and loss and grief but it doesn’t have to define it.

mónica teresa ortiz is a poet born and raised in Texas. Her first poetry collection, muted blood, was published by Black Radish Books in 2018. ortiz is the poetry editor for Raspa Magazine, a Queer Latinx literary and art journal.

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s theme is “Alchemy” and the readers are Joe Nick Patoski, Hugh Fitzsimons III, Bronte Treat, Elizabeth Harris, Dena Afrasiabi, and Gurf Morlix.

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.

A staff writer for Texas Monthly magazine for eighteen years, and a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, Joe Nick Patoski (top row, left) has authored and co-authored biographies of Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Selena, and the Dallas Cowboys, directed a film on the Texas musician Doug Sahm, and collaborated on books about the Texas Mountains, the Texas Coast, and Big Bend National Park. His tenth book is Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers & Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas.

Hugh Fitzsimons III (top row, middle) is a third-generation rancher from Dimmit County, Texas, and a director of the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District. He is currently expanding into the cultivation of environmentally beneficial restorative plants and crops. His first book, the memoir A Rock Between Two Rivers, was published in 2018 by Trinity University Press.

Bronte Treat (top row, right) is a writer based in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in Sorin Oak Review, Peach Fuzz Magazine, and Women of Venus. She studied Rhetoric and Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she was an editor of Arete Academic Journal. Her work is concerned with family history and identity.

Elizabeth Harris’s novel, Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman, winner of the Gival Press Novel Award and an Austin Chronicle Top Read of 2015, was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction. Her first collection of stories, The Ant Generator, was winner of the University of Iowa Press John Simmons Prize. Harris (bottom row, left) taught fiction writing and modern literature for a number of years at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She and her husband divide their time between the Texas coast and Austin.

Dena Afrasiabi (bottom row, middle) is an editor and fiction writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Toast, and Fiction Southeast, among other publications. Her writing has received fellowship support from the Millay Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s currently at work on a novel.

Gurf Morlix (bottom row, right) won mainstream recognition during his time as Lucinda Williams’ guitar player, musical director and producer. After they had a falling out over the band’s musical direction, Morlix moved on and became a freelance producer. Since then, he’s helmed projects by a diverse set of country and Americana artists including Robert Earl Keen, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Slaid Cleaves and Mary Gauthier, as well as his own records. His new recording is Impossible Blue 2019.

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.

In association with CAIR Austin, join us in celebrating Muslim Women’s Day with a reading from popular Instagram cartoonist and American-Muslim writer Huda Fahmy, author of Yes, I’m Hot in This: The Hilarious Truth about Life in a Hijab.

At some point in our lives, we’ve all felt a little out of place. Huda Fahmy has found it’s a little more difficult to fade into the crowd when wearing a hijab.

In Yes, I’m Hot in This, Huda navigates the sometimes-rocky waters of life from the unique perspective of a Muslim-American woman, breaking down misconceptions of her culture one comic at a time. From recounting the many questions she gets about her hijab every day (yes, she does have hair) and explaining how she runs in an abaya (just fine, thank you) to dealing with misconceptions about Muslims, Yes, I’m Hot in This tackles universal feelings from an point of view we don’t hear from nearly enough.

Every one of us have experienced love, misunderstanding, anger, and a deep desire for pizza. In Yes, I’m Hot in This, Huda’s clever comics demonstrate humor’s ability to bring us together, no matter how different we may appear on the surface.

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 Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. 

Perhaps every novelist harbors a monster at heart, an irrepressible and utterly irresponsible fantasist, not to mention a born and ingenious liar, without which all her art would go for naught. Angel, at any rate, is the story of such a monster. Angelica Deverell lives above her diligent, drab mother’s grocery shop in a dreary turn-of-the-century English neighborhood, but spends her days dreaming of handsome Paradise House, where her aunt is enthroned as a maid. But in Angel’s imagination, she is the mistress of the house, a realm of lavish opulence, of evening gowns and peacocks. Then she begins to write popular novels, and this fantasy becomes her life. And now that she has tasted success, Angel has no intention of letting anyone stand in her way—except, perhaps, herself.

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 Ursula Pike.

Featured reader Ursula Pike is a former ACC student who has earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has appeared in World Literature Today, and the Rio Review. She is a member of the Karuk Tribe of California who lives in Austin.

Join us for an evening with Austin Community College Performance Poet and Community Engagement Specialist Taria Person.

Taria Person “The Realest Person,” author of Rainbow Elephant, and playwright of the stageplay Hangers, performs poetry about conflict resolution through self-awareness, and acknowledging, respecting, and accepting each other’s differences.

“We read all types, we take all types. Aim to keep things light and fun.” Hosted by Jon Meador.

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.

Saturday, April 27th, is Independent Bookstore Day and we’re delighted to be taking part, with free cake (from 12pm until it runs out!) and 20% OFF EVERYTHING ALL DAY LONG! We’re also participating in the Austin Bookstore Crawl with a scavenger hunt! More info here.

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 Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst, translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin.

If life is no more than a prolonged flirtation with death, then Hilda Hilst’s Of Death. Minimal Odes is the true account of a lifelong seduction. It is at once both a reverie and reliquary, as the poet imagines and reimagines that most paradoxical moment of disintegration—the corporeal flesh fusing with death’s own dark corpus. With a visceral-mystical poetic voice that is as teasingly unrestrained as it is intellectually sublime, Hilst’s odes enact a baroque danse macabre, where the poet revels in the incongruities of simultaneously seeking the sacred and profane. Translating the first collection of Hilda Hilst’s significant body of poetry to appear in English, Laura Cescarco Eglin renders the imagery and philosophical complexity of these minimal odes with brio, while preserving the playful tone and lush melodies that mark Of Death. Minimal Odes as uniquely Hilstian.

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 E.C. Belli’s Objects of Hunger, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Featuring readings from E.C. Belli, Jay Deshpande, Marina Blitshteyn, and Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Objects of Hunger explores in reflective, raw lyrics the dread and beauty of our inner worlds as expressed through our struggles against the self and the other. Each poem is a slender organism that speaks its own mind, unafraid of pathos; the emotions here have been tried on and lived in, and the work accrues, lyric after lyric, page after page. In the second section, World War I poems are broken down and dismantled, as the voices of that era’s poets meld with that of a postpartum mother, exposing a shared vernacular among these disparate experiences. Other poems in the collection explore the unraveling and entrapments of the domestic, but with tenacity in place of softness, using a lexicon gathered from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, among others.

E.C. Belli is a bilingual poet and translator. Her translation of I, Little Asylum, a short novel by Emmanuelle Guattari, was published in 2014, and The Nothing Bird, selected poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd, appeared in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2010 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Her work has been published in Verse, AGNI, and FIELD, among others. Her work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and  PO&SIE.

Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger and The Rest of the Body (both from YesYes Books). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and is currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford.

Marina Blitshteyn is the author of Two Hunters, her first full-length collection, published by Argos Books this year with a CLMP Face-Out grant. Prior chapbooks include Russian for Lovers, Nothing Personal, $kill$ (read ‘skills’), and most recently Sheet Music. She lives and works in NYC.

Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018), was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest and being shortlisted for the National Book Award, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.

This event features eight terrific authors: Ali Vali, Barbara Ann Wright, Del Robertson, Erin O’Reilly, Lacey Schmidt, Laydin Michaels, MJ Williamz, and JM Dragon. With readings, panel discussion, and book signing. Free admission, refreshments, and book drawing.

Ali Vali (top left) is the author of 6 romantic thrillers in the popular Cain Casey series, and 2 books in her Balance of Forces series: Toujours Ici and Sera Toujours. Ali has also penned numerous stand alone novels. Her most recent publication is Answering the Call, which is a sequel to Calling the Dead. Her next novel (available in May, 2019) is Stormy Seas, a sequel to Blue Skies. Originally from Cuba, Ali has retained much of her family’s culture and traditions that influence her stories. She now lives outside New Orleans with her partner of over 32 years. When she isn’t writing, Ali works in the non-profit sector.

Barbara Ann Wright (top row, second from left) writes fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories when not ranting on her blog. Of her fantasy series, The Pyramid Waltz was one of Tor.com’s Reviewer’s Choice books of 2012, was a Foreword Review Book of the Year Award Finalist and a Goldie finalist, and won the 2013 Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Fantasy; and A Kingdom Lost was a Goldie finalist and won the 2014 Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Fantasy Romance. She has also written Thrall: Beyond Gold and Glory, a Viking-themed fantasy, and Paladins of the Storm Lord, a science fantasy, all from Bold Strokes Books. Her latest novel is Inheritors of Chaos.

Del Robertson (top row, third from left) has always been an avid reader, particularly, fantasy, history, the unusual, the offbeat, and the simply odd. She enjoys mixing all these elements into the stories she writes. Thanks to the women in charge at Affinity Rainbow Publications, she’s found a place to tell her tales: From the swash-buckling pirate adventure in Taming the Wolff to the sword-wielding My Fair Maiden, to the real story of St. Nic in Thundersnow and Lightning.

Over a decade ago, Erin O’Reilly (top row, at right) moved to the Texas Hill Country where she resides on Lake LBJ. Her hobbies include rock collecting, bird watching, and gardening. Erin also enjoys reading, cooking, and crafts. She is an active member of the Austin Sapphic Readers’ Group. Erin has a dual literary role as both publisher and author. She is the CEO of Affinity Rainbow Publications, which she co-founded with JM Dragon. In addition, Erin has penned over fifteen novels and co-authored the popular When Hell Meets Heaven series with JM Dragon. Erin is best known for her gentle love stories sprinkled with intrigue and surprises. Her latest novel is Addicted To You.

By day, Dr. Lacey Schmidt (bottom row, at left) 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. 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.

Laydin Michaels is from Houston, where she shares her home and her life with MJ Williamz. The wide blue skies and long empty roads of Texas have influenced her development as a writer. Being the thirteenth of sixteen children has influenced her desire to kill off characters. She is a mild mannered preschool teacher by day, and a writer of psychological thrillers by night. She has four published novels with Bold Strokes Books: Forsaken, Bitter Root, Buried Heart, and Captured Soul.

MJ Williamz (bottom row, third from left) is the author of seventeen novels, including three Goldie Award winners. She has also written over thirty short stories, most of them erotica with a few romance and horror thrown in for good measure. She lives in Houston with her wife and fur babies.

JM Dragon (bottom row, at right), originally from the UK, is now a New Zealand citizen living in the beautiful Canterbury countryside. She loves to garden and has over 140 chickens of various breeds to tend along with two alpacas, Cherokee and Comanche. She also has three adorable cats, her babies: Katie, Mr. Ginge, and Maxwell, aka Smarty Pants (because he is). When not taking care of the property, she has business interests in Affinity eBook Press, and of course, a love of writing. Published by Affinity Rainbow Publications, JM Dragon’s books include At Last, Breaking the Silence, the Promise, the best-selling Fix-it Girl, the Destiny series, and the 2015 GCLS winner, The One, plus many more. Her various collaborations with Erin O’Reilly include the popular When Hell Meets Heaven Series.

Come celebrate the release of chapbooks generated through a partnership between writers in the St. Edward’s University Poetry II class, designers in graphic design Junior Studio, and the Risograph Lab. Authors Emma Bernhoft, Jessica Enriquez, Melissa Gonzales, Morgan Hunicutt, Aleida Lopez, Kat McCollum, Madeleine McIlheran, Lizette Nava, Timothy Nguyen, Cielo Ontiveros, Gabriela Rendon, Madeline Smith, Daniela Urda Vazquez, and Taheera Washington will read from their work. Designers will be on hand to talk about the collaboration process with faculty mentors Sasha West and Jimmy Luu.

Join Hothouse Literary Journal for a reading from its spring publication. There will be copies of the free journal to pick up, a reading from some of the published writers, light refreshments, and conversation. Bring your friends! All are welcome.

Hothouse Literary Journal is the official journal for the UT English Department. They publish poetry, nonfiction, and fiction stories from multiple genres every year.

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 Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt.

A weird wonder of Argentine and modern literature and a crucial work for Julio Cortázar, The Seven Madmen begins when its hapless and hopeless hero, Erdosain, is dismissed from his job as a bill collector for embezzlement. Then his wife leaves him and things only go downhill after that. Brutal, uncouth, and brilliantly colored, The Seven Madmen takes its bearings from Dostoyevsky while looking forward to Thomas Pynchon and Marvel Comics.

“So firmly rooted was Arlt in the explosive urban society and political culture of his time that his book is able to illuminate what was actually to happen during the first Peronist era in the 1940s and in the country’s later descent into violence in the 1970s after Juan Peron had returned as President for the last time. It is one of the great books of the 20th century.” —The Guardian

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!