Malvern Books

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick.

This month’s featured reader is Eva Shelton, winner of The Insider Prize for Incarcerated Writers in Texas awarded by American Short Fiction.

Eva Shelton is 43 years old and was born and raised in Graham, Texas. In the third grade she started writing stories and poems for school and for fun. At the age of 25 she found herself headed to prison. She would spend the next eighteen years of her life surrounded by razor wire and amputated from societal norms. To pass the time she worked and she wrote. Her writing was her emotional release. She created worlds she could live in and her friends existed in ink on lines. She was released from prison on March 9th of this year and she finally took a deep, gasping breath of relief. She has had to learn to live in a world of technology and overwhelming choices as if she were Rip Van Winkle rising from slumber. The Insider Prize by American Short Fiction is her first monetary award for her writing.

Zoom Info:
https://austincc.zoom.us/j/91931157006?pwd=N3FTbDFROEpSZTNEaDQxTXJyalNGQT09

Join us in celebrating the US launch for Marian Schwartz’s translation of Nina Berberova’s The Last and the First, from Pushkin Press. Marian will be joined by Philip Boehm, who will be reading from his 2021 translation of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger.

AATIA’s Literary Special Interest Group (LitSIG), in coordination with Malvern Books, has planned this exciting program for this year’s celebration of International Translation Day.

On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs’ farm. Having fled revolution and civil war in Russia, the family has worked tirelessly to establish themselves as crop farmers in Provence, their hopes of returning home a distant dream. While young Ilya Stepanovich is committed to this new way of life, his step-brother Vasya looks only to the past. With the arrival of a letter from Paris, a plot to lure Vasya back to Russia begins in earnest, and Ilya must set out for the capital to try to preserve his family’s fragile stability.

The first novel by the celebrated Russian writer Nina Berberova, The Last and the First is an elegant and devastating portrayal of the internal struggles of a generation of émigrés. Appearing for the first time in English in a stunning translation by the prize-winning Marian Schwartz, it shows Berberova in full command of her gifts as a writer of masterful poise and psychological insight.

Marian Schwartz translates Russian classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including two NEA translation fellowships. Her latest published translation is Nina Berberova’s first novel, The Last and the First. Currently she is working on untranslated works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Philip Boehm has translated more than thirty books and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka and Hanna Krall. For these translations he has received numerous awards including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and most recently the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translators Prize. He also works as a theater director and playwright: works for the stage include Alma en venta, Mixtitlan, and Return of the Bedbug. Mr. Boehm is the founding Artistic Director of the Upstream Theater in St. Louis, recipient of the 2021 Missouri Arts Award.

Zoom Info:
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Meeting ID: 844 6092 3645
Passcode: 384198

This event can also be viewed live on our YouTube channel.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick.

This month’s featured reader is Stephanie Macias.

Stephanie Macias is a writer, artist, and musician living in Austin, TX. She is currently an MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at the The University of Texas at Austin. She is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Zoom Info:
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Meeting ID: 868 8731 8364
Passcode: 914142

Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Fall 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Sequoia Maner’s Little Girl Blue: Poems. Enjoy readings by Sequoia Maner and more. Full line up will be announced soon.

A handful of signed copies are available for curbside pick-up at the store. Unable to pick up at Malvern? Head over to Host Publications!

No need to register, this event will be live streaming at 7pm (central) through the Malvern Books YouTube page here: tinyurl.com/LGB-Launch.

Little Girl Blue: Poems is a collection of elegiac poems that conjures a tapestry of Black voices from history, the victims and the heroes who have helped us see ourselves and the world more truthfully. In these poems, we are not only called to witness injustice, but to hold space for what blooms from it: a confrontation full of exile and longing, an unshakable sense of joy that defies even death.

Sequoia Maner is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at Spelman College. She is a co-editor of the critical-creative book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2020) and at work on a forthcoming book regarding Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for the 33 1/3 series (Bloomsbury). Her writing has been published in Auburn Avenue, The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and other venues.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick.

This month’s featured reader is Kendra Christel.

Kendra Christel is a writer, actress, and singer from Austin, Texas. She considers herself a Jill of all trades. She began performing at the age of 3 as part of the Joyce Willett Dance Company. She began writing at age 8, winning a college scholarship in an essay contest, and began singing in her church’s adult choir at age 11. An alumna of Texas State University with a B.A. in Mass Communications and Journalism, Kendra served as an E-Board member of the only Black theater group on campus, Ebony Players. Kendra is also an alumna of the University of Georgia, having earned her M.F.A. in Screenwriting. As a Screenwriter, Kendra has placed as a semi-finalist in the Final Draft Big Break screenwriting competition 2020, the Oscar’s Nicholl Fellowship 2021, and the 2nd round of the 2021 Austin Film Festival. Her novel, Abela, was a featured reading at the Diverse Literary Voices of Austin 2019 conference. As an actress and singer, she was also named Broadway World Austin’s Performer of the Decade and Vocalist of the Decade for her role as Deloris Van Cartier in Sister Act. The newest member of the St. Stone family, she enjoys performing drag as a friend of the Royal Court of Austin to help raise money for HIV/AIDS awareness. She currently resides in the Atlanta area.

Zoom Info:
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Meeting ID: 826 8003 2230
Passcode: 171138

Join us via Zoom for a reading with Awst Press, featuring authors Donald Quist, Andrew Yoon, and Esteban Rodríguez.

Donald Quist will be reading from a new book of essays, To Those Bounded. Andrew Yoon’s poetry collection We Are Invited to Climb, part of Awst’s “pocket book” collection, came out in September. And local author Esteban Rodriguez recently published a debut essay collection called Before the Earth Devours Us.

Donald Quist is author of Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner and International Book Awards Finalist. He has a linked story collection, For Other Ghosts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and was Notable in Best American Essays 2018. He is creator of the online nonfiction series PAST TEN. Donald has received fellowships from Sundress Academy for the Arts, Kimbilio Fiction, and served as a Gus T. Ridgel fellow for the English PhD program at University of Missouri. He is Director of the MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Andrew Yoon is a New York-based Korean-American artist involved in music, poetry, and computers. Lately he is writing poems that change, making music with paint and dance, live-coding sounds, and leading the Melodica Drone and Bach Orchestra. He is the founder of the arts journal and small press Nothing to Say. As a free culture advocate everything he makes is under copyleft licenses, including this collection.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.

Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 822 8835 4224
Passcode: 186776

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Leticia Urieta’s Las Criaturas. With readings from Leticia Urieta and Sueitko Zamorano-Chavez.

Las Criaturas is a hybrid collection that blends poetic and speculative narrative forms to tell stories of untold women. The poems and short stories play with traditional storytelling forms and tales to ruminate on the monstrous, unruly, vulnerable, strength and beauty in the feminine and seek to reclaim people’s power in powerless situations. The book is broken into three sections to show the multifaceted nature of the word “criatura.” In the story, “The Monster” a child in a migrant detention center is haunted by a monster made of her own fear. In “La Mujer Alacran,” a woman who is sexually assaulted transforms into a literal “scorpion woman” in order to protect herself. In “The Inbetween Mother,” a daughter attempts to reunite her selkie mother with her true form.

Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a teaching artist in the greater Austin community and a freelance writer. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, Lumina, The Offing, Kweli Journal, Medium, Electric Lit and others. Her chapbook, The Monster, is out now from LibroMobile Press and her hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.

Zoom Info:
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Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick.

This month’s featured reader is Maurice Chammah.

Maurice Chammah is a writer and journalist, and the author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, which was published earlier this year. He works for The Marshall Project, a non-profit news outlet that covers the U.S. criminal justice system, where he was on a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He helps organize The Insider Prize, a contest for incarcerated writers, sponsored by the magazine American Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Zoom Info:
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For over twenty years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Texas’ most iconic poets. Join the celebration as poets from across Texas read about the diverse culture, iconography, and geography of our home state. Come share the holiday spirit via Zoom!

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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of two poetry collections from John Sibley Williams: The Drowning House, winner of The Elixir Press Poetry Award, and Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, winner of The Cider Press Review Book Award. With guests Chloe Martinez and Esteban Rodriguez.

“In The Drowning House, John Sibley Williams grapples with ghosts, the predators outside and in, those closer than our own hearts. In American landscapes haunted by nooses and wolves, burning crosses and floods, Williams holds a light before his path. These are keen-edged poems, kneeling before us, asking forgiveness for what our ancestors have done and have had to live through. He offers himself as a sacrifice for our sins: ‘here, love, is the tree of my body // to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch / whatever’s still up there, beautifully above us.'” —Philip Metres

“With an impressive mastery of sound matched only by his alchemical imagery, Williams guides readers along mythic highways, above oceans, and towards the reimagining of a bridge no one remembers. To conjure is a recurring theme in this impressive collection—as if language holds the power to reconfigure a past, a mother, a child. And perhaps it can. Williams’ words are that convincing. Recasting home as conch shell, as ghost house, and as fire, we learn that we are held together by the tensile strength of our own narrative. I’ve circled and underlined lines on nearly every poem in Scale Model of a Country at Dawn. This is a book you’ll want to read, and then turn to the first poem to enter again. Even if no one is safe from the wolves in our hearts, John Sibley Williams helps us live within these contradictions.” —Susan Rich

John Sibley Williams is the author of four award-winning poetry collections: The Drowning House, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, As One Fire Consumes Another, and Skin Memory. A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of Caesura Poetry Workshop.

Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Common, Shenandoah and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.

Zoom Information:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87675014021?pwd=UUY0aVA0MFU5T2dkdVRDMlFtYVBPQT09

Meeting ID: 876 7501 4021
Passcode: 817232

Join us in celebrating Kallisto Gaia Press’ joint release of two new chapbooks: How to Identify Yourself with a Wound by Austin poet KB, winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize; and a new collection, Motherboard, from a Saguaro Poetry Prize finalist, Vermont poet Renee Rossi.

“The poems in How to Identify Yourself with a Wound pull no punches. Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize

KB is a Black queer nonbinary miracle. They are the author of HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) and Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023). KB is a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow and has words published in Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere.

“Motherboard possesses a compelling voice that moves you from awe at the abundant beauty of the natural world and transcendent life moments to a strange fear of how vulnerable our happinesses are, how changeable the world is. And yet, the poet’s voice is sure and strong, negotiating the changing terrain of our lives.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize

Renée Rossi has published the full-length poetry collection, TRIAGE, and two chapbooks: THIRD Worlds and STILL LIFE, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize. A native of Detroit, she currently divides her time between the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and other places that she finds compelling.

Zoom Information:

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This month’s featured reader is Dalia Azim.

Dalia Azim was born in Canada and raised in the United States. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train (where she received their Short Story Award for New Writers), Other Voices, and The Washington Post, among other places. Her first book, Country of Origin, will be published by A Strange Object/Deep Vellum in March 2022. Dalia is the manager of special projects at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas; she previously worked as a researcher at the Dedalus Foundation and as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. She graduated with a dual degree in art and literature from Stanford University and grew up in Colorado.

Zoom Info:
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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the Austin launch of E.C. Belli’s second collection, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep (Anhinga Press), winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. With readings from E.C. Belli, Sam Ross, Safiya Sinclair, and Diana Khoi Nguyen.

“When Sappho was asked to define beauty, she answered ‘Some people say it’s a herd of black horses in the grass, some people say it’s a fleet of warships leaving the harbor. I say beauty is whatever you love.’ Reading E.C. Belli’s sensational A Sleep That is Not Our Sleep, I kept thinking of that bit of Sappho, thinking of Belli’s remarkable affinity for rendering with precision and acuity what is beloved, what is lovable, and what is unloved but worthy of it. One page reads, in its entirety, ‘little clavicle bone, you grew // things grow well in me.’ The verse odes the beauty of a bone, yes, but also the beauty of a self capable of growing and sustaining what it’s made. In this collection, stones whisper in the night, eyes mend into dials. The poem ‘Hues’ is worth the sticker price alone. To say it simply: Belli has written a singular collection, one I’ll be learning from for years.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell

E.C. Belli is a bilingual poet and translator. Her second book, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep, was selected by Cathy Park Hong to be winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry (Anhinga Press, 2022). Her debut collection of poems, Objects of Hunger, is winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019). Her translation of I, Little Asylum, a short novel by Emmanuelle Guattari, was released by Semiotext(e) for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and The Nothing Bird, her translation of some selected poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd, appeared with Oberlin College Press (2013). She is the recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and her work has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, AGNI, and FIELD. Work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE (France), among others. She is the author of the chapbook plein jeu.

Sam Ross is the author of Company, winner of the Four Way Book Levis Prize in Poetry and the 2020 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Tin House, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications, and he has received support from Columbia University School of the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is also a painter.

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK. Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Civitella Rainieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her memoir, How to Say Babylon, is forthcoming in 2023 from Simon & Schuster.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. This spring 2022, she is an artist-in-residence at Brown University.

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Passcode: 703398

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Maria Wells’ Images in the Clouds: Reading the Sky.

“These poems have personal integrity and are both deeply felt and clearly voiced, always welcome in any art.” —Kurt Heinzelman, Professor Emeritus of Poetry and Poetics, The University of Texas at Austin

A combination of sixty poems and ten color illustrations, Images in the Clouds carries the reader forward and back in time, to inner and outer worlds. Taken from Wells’ treasure trunk of a life of adventure and world travel, some verses share memories of places and people, while some delight with pure fantasy and imagination.

A Fulbright Scholar and Doctoral graduate from the University of Pisa, Maria Xenia Wells Zevelechi spent her career at the University of Texas at Austin. After retiring from academia, she embraced poetry. Inspired by a friend’s painting, her first poem was “Memories in Silver,” written in Paris, at a meeting of Poets and Writers. A member of the Austin Poetry Society, she gives readings in Austin, Paris, and Greece. Her civic and cultural participation has included an active role in the Sierra Club, President of the Board of Director of Salon Concerts, member of the Fundraiser and Scholarship Committee for Zonta International Association of Business and Professional Women, and member of the Leadership Circle of Austin PBS. With two daughters, five grandchildren, and the memory of a loving husband, she lives in Austin, Texas.

Zoom Information:

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Meeting ID: 886 5800 6464
Passcode: 341837

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the release of Tomás Q. Morín’s new memoir, Let Me Count the Ways. Laura Marris, translator of the new edition of Camus’ The Plague—the first new translation of The Plague to be published in the United States in more than seventy years—will join as well.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author most recently of the poetry collection Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He is coeditor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, Slate, and Boston Review.

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Yale Review, The Believer, The Point, and elsewhere. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. With Alice Kaplan, she is the co-author of States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (forthcoming in fall 2022). She is currently at work on her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, which will be published by Graywolf in 2024.

Zoom Info:
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Meeting ID: 899 4412 5202
Passcode: 587107

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This month’s featured reader is Adam Soto.

Adam Soto is the author of the novel This Weightless World. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently lives with his wife in Austin, Texas, where he is a teacher and the web editor of American Short Fiction. His second book, a collection of ghost stories entitled Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, will be released this fall.

Zoom Info:

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Meeting ID: 879 6988 5873
Passcode: 648283

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. This month’s featured reader is Scott Semegran.

Scott Semegran is an award-winning writer of eight books. BlueInk Review described him best as “a gifted writer, with a wry sense of humor.” His latest novel, The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island, is about four middle school friends who sneak away to an abandoned lake house to evade the wrath of high school bullies, only to become stranded on the lake’s desolate island. It won First Place in the 2021 Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for Middle-Grade/Young Adult Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, four kids, two cats, and a dog. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English.

Zoom Info:

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Meeting ID: 869 1031 6763
Passcode: 360355

Join us via Zoom for a conversation between Fernando A. Flores, author of the recently released short story collection Valleyesque, and Edward Carey.

“These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores’s deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives.” —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Frédéric Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Juárez in the aftermath of his mother’s death, attempting to recover his beloved piano that was seized at the border, while a muralist is taken on a psychedelic journey by an airbrushed Emiliano Zapata T-shirt. A woman is engulfed by a used-clothing warehouse with a life of its own, and a grieving mother breathlessly chronicles the demise of a town decimated by violence. In two separate stories, queso dip and musical rhythms are bottled up and sold for mass consumption. And in the final tale, Flores pieces together the adventures of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as he starts a music career in Texas.

Swinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, Valleyesque is a boundary- and border-pushing collection from a one-of-a-kind stylist and voice. With the visceral imagination that made his debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, a cult classic, Flores brings his vision of the border to life—and beyond.

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in Norfolk, England. He is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva: the Twins Who Saved a City, and of the YA Iremonger Trilogy, which have all been translated into many different languages and all of which he illustrated. His novel Little has been published in 20 countries; his most recent novel is The Swallowed Man, which is set inside the belly of an enormous sea beast. He has taught creative writing and fairy tales on numerous occasions at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and at the Michener Center, and the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Zoom Information:

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Laura Villareal’s new poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving. With guests Ana Portnoy Brimmer, T.K. Lê, and Alfredo Aguilar.

Tumbleweeds and wandering cacti litter the page, coyotes croon at the prose. In poems haunted by specters of intimate partner violence, Girl’s Guide to Leaving considers what it means to escape the love that trapped you and find a temporary home in the barely cooled ashes of a wildfire.

Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and the chapbook The Cartography of Sleep (Nostrovia!, 2018). She has received fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and National Book Critics Circle. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, AGNI, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer (pictured left) is a poet and organizer from Puerto Rico. She holds a BA and an MA from the University of Puerto Rico, and is an alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. To Love An Island, her debut poetry collection, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. She is currently working on the Spanish edition, forthcoming from La Impresora. Ana is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020, and was named one of Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets. She is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, resides in Puerto Rico and lives for dance parties and revolution.

T.K. Lê (she/her; pictured middle) is a multi-genre writer who grew up in Westminster, CA. She received her M.A. from UCLA in Asian American Studies, is an alum of the VONA Voices summer writing workshop, and was a 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, and in the W.W. Norton anthology, Inheriting the War. She serves as a board member for Viet Rainbow of Orange County, a grassroots organization that primarily works with LGBTQ+ Vietnamese Americans and their loved ones. She loves the outdoors and even more than that, she loves cats.

Alfredo Aguilar (pictured right) is the author of On This Side of the Desert, selected by Natalie Diaz for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What Happens On Earth. He is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North County San Diego, he currently resides in Central Texas where he is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.

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Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted this month by Ursula Pike.

This month’s featured reader is Crisosto Apache.

Crisosto Apache is originally from Mescalero, New Mexico (US), on the Mescalero Apache Reservation, and currently lives in the Denver metro area in Colorado, with their spouse. They are Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo) of the Salt Clan born for the Towering House Clan, and is Assistant Professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. They hold an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Crisosto’s debut collection is GENESIS (Lost Alphabet, 2018). Crisosto’s second forthcoming collection is Ghostword, out by Gnashing Teeth Publication mid-2022. Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in The Rumpus, Loch Raven Review, Poetry Foundation’s POETRY Magazine, ANMLY Magazine, Digging Through The Fat, and McGraw Hill Publishing.

Zoom Info:

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Rob Stanton’s new poetry collection, Journeys. With readings from Rob, as well as guests Cathy Eisenhower, Ken Jacobs, and Ashley Smith Keyfitz.

“Through translation, through omission, through compression and the minimalist precision of ‘canny wee things,’ Rob Stanton creates a marvelous texture of voices and references which offers us a glimpse of the just-barely-thereness of a world thought into being by language.” —Stephen Collis

“Stanton is a collagist of tone and function … gathering up our linguistic detritus and redeploying it as something beguiling and beautiful.” —Jon Stone 

Born, raised and educated in the UK, Rob Stanton has lived and taught in Austin, Texas for a decade now. He is the author of The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011) as well as Journeys (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2022), plus the chapbooks Trip- (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2013) and, in collaboration with Colin Winborn, Takes, Cuts (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2017).

Ashley Smith Keyfitz us the author of the chapbooks Water Shed, Come Such Frequency, Pigeon of Tears, and the full-length collection Park of Unwired Asking, as well as other small books and ephemera. She lives in Austin.

Join Zoom meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81304139368?pwd=MVd6R0FIa0xwNzNsdEZSZHdmQU1nUT09

Meeting ID: 813 0413 9368
Passcode: 850781

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by A.R. Rogers.

This month’s featured reader is Bianca Alyssa Pérez.

Bianca Alyssa Pérez was born and raised in Mission, Texas, a small southern town bordering Mexico. She holds her MFA in Poetry from Texas State University, where she also teaches. She is the 2022-2023 Clark House Writer-In-Residence. Her chapbook, Gemini Gospel, is forthcoming March 2023 from Host Publications.

Zoom Info:

Join us for a conversation between Rita Zoey Chin and Cecily Sailer. They’ll be discussing Rita Zoey Chin’s new novel, The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern (Melville House Publishing). This event will take place via Zoom.

Author photo: C.E. Courtney

The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting novel about the transcendent power of the imagination, the magic at the threshold of past and present, and the will it takes to love. When 6-year-old empath Leah Fern—once “The Youngest and Very Best Fortune Teller in the World”—is abandoned by her beautiful magician mother, she is consumed with longing for her mother’s return… until something bizarre happens: on her 21st birthday, Leah receives an inheritance from someone she doesn’t even know, and finds herself launched on a journey of magical discovery. It’s a voyage that will spiral across the United States, Canada, into the Arctic Circle and beyond—and help her make her own life whole by piecing together the mystery surrounding her mother’s disappearance.

Rita Zoey Chin is the author of the widely praised memoir, Let the Tornado Come. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is the recipient of a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, an Academy of American Poets Award, and a Bread Loaf scholarship. She has taught at Towson University and at Grub Street in Boston. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Tin House, and Marie Claire. The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is her first novel.

Zoom Information:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82104328050?pwd=SGpIK3lBY3VMY20wejAycDYrVVB4UT09

Meeting ID: 821 0432 8050
Passcode: 150762

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by A.R. Rogers.

This month’s featured reader is Chaitali Sen.

Chaitali Sen is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky (Europa Editions 2015) and the short story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by Sarabande Books in January 2023. Her stories and essays have appeared in Boulevard, Ecotone (receiving a special mention in the 2019 Best American Short Stories Anthology), Shenandoah, New England Review, New Ohio Review, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Catapult, and many other publications. Kirkus Reviews called The Pathless Sky “a searingly vivid portrayal of the depths of human emotions-from the first glow of young love to the deeper strength of middle-aged commitment. A poignant and sophisticated work couched in lyrical, effervescent prose.” It was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Fiction, and included on Idra Novey’s Buzzfeed list “10 Books That Challenge Our Political Landscape by Inventing New Ones,” Library Journal’s “Top Fall Indie Fiction,” and Mic.com’s “25 Essential Reads to Make Women’s History Last Longer than a Month.”

A graduate of the Hunter College MFA in Fiction, she is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice. She has been a frequent panelist, presenter, and instructor for Writers League of Texas, Grub Street’s Muse & Marketplace Conference, Texas Book Festival, and The Asian American Writers Workshop, and was a featured writer at the New Voices Festival at Ithaca College in 2017 and the first annual Tasveer South Asian Literary Festival in Seattle in 2019.

Zoom Info:

Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Fall 2022 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Sophia Stid’s But for I Am a Woman.

The lineup is still being finalized—check back soon!

No need to register, this event will be live streaming at 7pm (central) through Malvern Books’ YouTube page.

In But for I Am a Woman, Sophia Stid’s work explores the intersection of personal autonomy and deep spiritual connection through the writings and life of Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342 – 1416), a mystic who was the first woman known to write a book in the English language, “a woman who had herself / declared dead / so she could write.” Through this companionship, Stid creates a reliquary of language, poems as physical containers for the sacred, gathered like loose rosary beads from the floorboards. It is through the physical body that these poems eloquently chisel a space for reconciliation and grief-healing, bathing “in water, words, and other lives.”

These are poems that seek the liberation of Self, and of womankind, through fluid contemplation as the speaker moves through her own process of grief-healing. She discovers with Julian that “when the book of the world opens, it is not / as we thought,” that it is through brokenness, blood, and tears—through the body—that the spirit is found, and ignited.

Sophia Stid is a poet from California. She was the 2019 – 2022 Ecotone Postgraduate Fellow at UNC Wilmington and a recent graduate of the MFA program at Vanderbilt University and Georgetown University, where she studied poetry and theology. She is the winner of the 2021 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose from Gulf Coast and has received fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Recent poems and essays can be found or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and Kenyon Review, among others.

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by A.R. Rogers.

This month’s featured reader is Raul Garza.

Raul Garza is a Latinx playwright who has drawn acclaim for telling stories that resound with authenticity and sense of place. He boldly explores the intersection of popular culture and cultural identity, and incorporates music, spirituality, and the power of nostalgia into works that span time and location. When not writing, Raul vibes on kundalini yoga, devours pop culture, and travels beyond his means.

Zoom Info:

Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom for the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by A.R. Rogers.

This month’s featured reader is Natalie Lima.

Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer from Las Vegas, NV and Hialeah, FL. Her essays and fiction have been published in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Her writing has been honored in Best Small Fictions (2020), and noted twice in Best American Essays (2019 and 2020). She has received fellowships from PEN America Emerging Voices, Letras Boricus/the Mellon Foundation, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the VONA/Voices Workshop, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and a residency from Hedgebrook. Natalie teaches creative writing at Butler University as Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She is currently working on a memoir and an essay collection.

Zoom Info:

Join us via Zoom for a conversation between authors Martha Anne Toll and Devi Laskar. We’ll be celebrating the release of Martha Anne Toll’s new novel, Three Muses, and Devi Laskar also has a recent release, Circa.

Three Muses is a love story that enthralls; a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. In post-WWII New York, John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to wrest his life from his terror of music and his past. Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path to Prima Ballerina of the New York State Ballet, becoming enmeshed in an abusive relationship with her choreographer, who makes Katya a star but controls her life. When John receives a ticket to attend a ballet featuring Katya Symanova, a spell is cast. As John and Katya follow circuitous paths to one another, fear and promise rise in equal measure. Three muses—Song, Discipline, and Memory—weave their way through love and loss, heartbreak and triumph to leave readers of this prize-winning debut breathless.

Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Toll brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, Pointe Magazine, The Millions, and elsewhere. She also publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets. Toll has recently joined the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of the 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South; winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; and finalist for the Northern California Book awards. Her second novel, Circa was published May 3, 2022 by Mariner Books. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War will be published by Mariner in early 2024. She holds degrees from Columbia University, University of Illinois and UNC-CH. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family.

Join Zoom meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83949015855?pwd=UWtFbURLWnZFQ2lBc1FBN2pGMktjZz09

Meeting ID: 839 4901 5855
Passcode: 373231

This event can also be viewed live on our YouTube channel.