Welcome to Malvern Books!

BlogMalvern Books is now closed. Malvern Books was a bookstore and community space in Austin, Texas. We specialized in visionary literature and poetry from independent publishers, with a focus on lesser-known and emerging voices.


An Update from the Manager of Malvern Books

Dear Friends,

We’ve had a wonderful time sharing our favorite books with you over the past nine years, and it’s been an honor to celebrate the work of so many brilliant writers through our readings and events.

Malvern Books is the realization of Joe Bratcher’s vision—Joe dreamt of a bookstore that would carry the books he loved, mostly poetry and fiction from small, independent presses. He wanted to promote writers and translators of books from other countries, while also championing the work of local writers.

When Joe first talked to me about opening Malvern Books, I must admit I was skeptical. I didn’t think we’d find an audience. It was 2012 and everyone was saying that bookstores were dead, Kindle and online shopping were the future. I anticipated many quiet sales days, with Joe and I just sitting there, looking at each other. He told me if that’s how it ended up, well, at least we’d have a chance to chat—and since we always seemed to laugh a lot when we talked, it sounded like a good way to spend some time. And so from then on, whenever we’d have a really slow sales day, with just a few people coming in, we’d look at each other and say, “We’re living the dream!” and we’d laugh.

But back to opening… in early 2013, with the help of our amazing architect, contractor, and interior designer, we created the space that Joe had in mind. We started posting on social media thanks to Tracey, our wonderful digital media manager and first Malvern hire. And we were so grateful to the many enthusiastic writers and readers who expressed their excitement at the imminent arrival of Malvern Books. From the very beginning it felt like we were building a community.

We opened our doors in October 2013, and we were shocked by how many people came by. You showed up and you loved what we had to offer! You constantly surprised and humbled us with your kind words and helpful suggestions. People from out of town would visit the store because a local friend had told them they had to come by, and we received much appreciated shout-outs from the Austin Chronicle and numerous other newspapers and journals.

And then 2020 hit—but even with the pandemic, we had loyal customers who came by for curbside pick ups, signed up for individual shopping appointments, and participated in our Zoom book clubs and events. If we didn’t say it enough, THANK YOU!

All along the way, we were lucky enough to have truly wonderful staff members who loved the books we carried and who helped us build the store we have now. Their work has been invaluable and we could not have done this without them.

On July 28th of this year, we lost Joe. I can’t tell you how hard it has been to try and carry on in this space without him. Our little Malvern world has not been the same since, and, as much as we love this store and our amazing customers, Malvern Books simply cannot continue without our Joe.

Malvern Books will be closing on December 31st, 2022. It has been a wonderful nine years and we thank each and every one of our cherished customers, friends, staff, and suppliers for helping us along the way.

As we move forward, we’ll be sharing our plans with you for sales and specials. For now, we just wanted to let you know this was coming. We hope you all continue to seek out works in translation and books published by small presses—there is so much great stuff out there—and that you continue to support our local independent bookstores, like our dear friends at BookWoman, among others. But, most importantly, we hope to see you in the store sometime soon, to say goodbye and to thank you, both for being the readers that you are and because you have come with us on this incredibly fulfilling journey in Joe’s world.

With heartfelt thanks and wishing you all the best,

Becky Garcia,
Manager, Malvern Books

Dec
17
Tue
Albert Huffstickler Birthday Celebration
Dec 17 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join us for a poetry reading to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler. With M.C. Sylvia Manning.

Albert HuffsticklerAlbert 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.”

Dec
18
Wed
Why There Are Words Austin
Dec 18 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s theme is Reconciliation and our guests are Sandra Sidi, Carrie Fountain, Josh Denslow, and The Flyin’ A’s (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.

Sandra Sidi writes fiction and nonfiction. She was a military analyst in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008. She is an MFA Candidate at Texas State University San Marcos, and holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Yale University. Her first piece, “Get A Weapon,” was published in The Atlantic and is forthcoming in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: An Anthology by Kendall Hunt Publishing. She is working on a novel about Israeli soldiers.

Carrie Fountain is a poet and novelist, and serves as the 2019 Texas Poet Laureate. She is the author of two poetry collections, Instant Winner and Burn Lake, winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Award, and the YA novel I’m Not Missing. Her first children’s book, The Poem Forest (Candlewick Press, 2020) tells the story of American poet W.S. Merwin and the palm forest he grew from scratch on the island of Maui. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and The New Yorker, among many others. She is the host of KUT’s This Is Just to Say, a radio show and podcast where she has intimate conversations on the writing life with other poets and writers. Fountain is writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University, and lives in Austin, TX.

Josh Denslow’s short stories have appeared in print and online in such fine places as Barrelhouse, Third Coast, Cutbank, Wigleaf, and Black Clock, among many others. NOT EVERYONE IS SPECIAL, his debut short story collection, will be published in 2019 by 7.13 Books. Along with his wife and his brother-in-law, he plays drums in the band Borrisokane. KUTX called us “synth-punk gloom-wonders” and the band was hailed by the Austin Chronicle as one of the Best New Local Acts of 2013. They are currently recording thier first full-length album.

The Flyin’ A’s perform Americana with a Texas Kick. This husband and wife duo hails from Austin, Texas. You can hear their Texas roots in all they do. The high energy duo is famous for their top-notch songwriting, breathtaking harmonies, and exceptional live performance. Their latest album You Drive Me Crazy was selected to be on the 2017 first round Grammy Ballot and has taken them on tour around the US, UK, and the EU, and now they are headed to NZ for the first time. From Stuart Adamson’s outstanding lead guitar work and gritty vocals to Hilary Claire Adamson’s powerhouse vocal gymnastics and lilting harmonies, it is no wonder this duo is quickly gaining momentum both at home and abroad. They combine the best of Texas country, southern blues, folk and gospel to create an original sound that is all their own.

Jan
4
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Open Mic
Jan 4 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

In association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.

Jan
19
Sun
Wendy Barker Book Launch
Jan 19 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the release of Wendy Barker’s seventh full-length collection of poems, GLOSS. With readings from Wendy, as well as special guests Van G. Garrett and Michael Anania.

Posing haunting questions about the background of Barker’s British mother, GLOSS  includes poems in a variety of forms that meditate on a Chinese scroll and on inherited pieces of silver. Other poems “gloss” family memories to reveal underlying meanings of inherited stories, as the book builds to reveal disturbing facts long hidden.

Wendy Barker’s sixth collection of poetry, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press, 2015). Her fifth chapbook is Shimmer (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). An anthology of poems about the 1960s, Far Out: Poems of the ’60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016. Other books include a selection of poems with accompanying essays, Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002), and a selection of translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems, co-translated with Saranindranath Tagore, Braziller, 2001. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Southern Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Plume,as well as The Best American Poetry 2013. She is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), as well as co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships among other awards, she is the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Chair and Poet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982. Wendy is married to the critic, biographer, essayist, and poet Steven G. Kellman.


Van G. Garrett is the winner of the 2017 Best Book of African American Poetry for his book, 49: Wings and Prayers, as announced by the Texas Association of Authors. Garrett is the author of Songs in Blue Negritude (poetry), The Iron Legs in the Trees (fiction), 49: Wings and Prayers (poetry), LENNOX IN TWELVE (poetry), HOG (poetry), ZURI: Love Songs (poetry), and Water Bodies (fall 2019).


Michael Anania is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. His published work includes twelve collections of poetry, among them Selected Poems (1994), In Natural Light (1999), Heat Lines (2006), and Nightsongs and Clamors (2018). His work is widely anthologized and has been translated into Italian, German, French, Spanish and Czech. He has also published a novel, The Red Menace, and a collection of essays, In Plain Sight. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the Charles Angoff Award and the Aniello Lauri Award for poems in this collection. Anania was poetry editor of Audit, a quarterly, founder and co-editor of Audit/Poetry, poetry and literary editor of The Swallow Press, poetry editor of Partisan Review and a contributing editor to Tri-Quarterly, and has served as an advisory editor to a number of other magazines and presses. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the faculty in writing at Northwestern University. He also taught at SUNY at Buffalo and the University of Chicago. He lives in Austin, Texas, and on Lake Michigan.

Jan
26
Sun
Borderlands: Issue 51 Launch Party
Jan 26 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Bring friends—join the celebration! The event is free of charge and open to everyone. Copies will be available for purchase on-site.

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

Jan
29
Wed
Kiran Bhat Book Launch
Jan 29 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kiran Bhat’s new novel, we of the forsaken world

In a distant corner of the globe, a man journeys to the birthplace of his mother, a tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill. In a nameless remote tribe, the chief’s second son is born, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are being destroyed by loggers. In one of the world’s sprawling metropolises, a homeless one-armed woman sets out to take revenge upon the men who trafficked her. And, in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud-and- concrete road, a milkmaid watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.

In we of the forsaken world… Kiran Bhat tells the stories of four worlds falling apart, through the structure of four linguistic chains, comprised of the accounts of four people witnessing the decline of these worlds, in four acts. Like modern communication networks, these 16 stories connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable of its own, into the mind of a distinct human being. These are the tales of not just sixteen strangers, but many different lives, who live on this planet, at every second, everywhere.

Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. His list of homes is vast, but he considers Mumbai the only place of the moment worth settling down in. He currently lives in Melbourne.

Jan
31
Fri
Chad Bennett Book Launch
Jan 31 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of Chad Bennett’s debut poetry collection, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era, selected by Ocean Vuong for Sarabande Books’ Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. With readings from local poets, including Lisa Moore, Cindy St. John, Desiree Morales, Austin Rodenbiker, and Sequoia Maner.

Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of “Silver Springs,” Frank Ocean lyrics staking new territory on the page: this is a taste of the cultural landscape sampled in Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era. Chad Bennett casually combines icons of the way we live now—GIFs, smartphones, YouTube—with a classical lover’s lament. The result is certainly a deeply personal account of loss, but more critically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness. “This is our sorrow. Once it seemed theirs, but now it’s ours. They still inhabit it, yet we say it’s ours.” All at once cerebral, physical, personal, and communal, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era constructs a future worth celebrating.

Chad Bennett’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Offing, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Volta, and elsewhere. He is the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry, a study of twentieth century poetry and the queer art of gossip. Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era, his first book of poems, was selected by Ocean Vuong for Sarabande Books’ Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.


Lisa L. Moore is the author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and has published four other books of feminist and queer writing and criticism. In addition to her chapbook 24 Hours of Men, Lisa Moore’s poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, The Fourth River, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and other periodicals. She is Archibald A. Hill Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of the Program in LGBTQ Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.


Cindy St. John is the author of Dream Vacation, a collection of daybook entries and poems; I Wrote This Poem, a poetry chapbook illustrated by Michael Burkard; as well as three other chapbooks. She lives in Austin, TX.


Desiree Morales is a poet and educator in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in What Rough Beast, Conflict of Interest, and the forthcoming I Scream Social Anthology. She grew up in Southern California and plans to never stop talking about it.


Austin Rodenbiker’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House Online, Prelude, Narrative, and PRISM international. He received his MFA from the New Writers Project and he holds an MA in gender studies from the University of Texas at Austin.


Sequoia Maner is a poet and Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She is coeditor of the book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, January 2020). Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in venues such as The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland” was a finalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize and she is at work on a critical manuscript about the history of African American Elegy.

Feb
2
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Open Mic
Feb 2 @ 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

In association with Art Spark Texas (formerly VSA Texas) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive open mic for writers, performers, and acoustic 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.

Feb
10
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse: Reading & Open Mic
Feb 10 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. 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 Jeremy Garrett.

Jeremy Garrett is the writer-in-residence at the Katherine Anne Porter House in Kyle, TX. His fiction and essays have appeared in Gargoyle, The Susquehanna Review, and phati’tude, among others, and his story “The Exhausted Pose” won an Esoteric Award in LGBT fiction from Carve Magazine. He is currently at work on a novel.

Feb
19
Wed
ACC Creative Writing Department’s Balcones Prize Winners
Feb 19 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us for something rather special: Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department will be introducing us to the two winners of their 2018 Balcones Prize. Shena McAuliffe will read from The Good Echo (2018 Balcones Fiction Prize) and Margaree Little will read from her collection Rest (2018 Balcones Poetry Prize).

Shena McAuliffe’s debut novel, The Good Echo (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), won the Big Moose Prize and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her essay collection, Glass, Light, Electricity, winner of the Permafrost Prize in nonfiction, is forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press in February 2020. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado, and now lives in Schenectady, New York, where she is an assistant professor of fiction at Union College.

Margaree Little is the author of REST (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2019 Audre Lorde Award. She holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her poems and criticism have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals; her translations from the Russian have appeared in Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail and are forthcoming in APR. Little is the recipient of fellowships and awards including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo/ France Fellowship, a Kenyon Review Fellowship, and an Ohio Individual Excellence Award. She lives in Tucson and teaches at Pima Community College.

Sponsored by the ACC Creative Writing  Department. This event is free and open to the public.

Feb
22
Sat
Kallisto Gaia Press presents The Ocotillo Review Volume 4.1
Feb 22 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of the 2020 winter 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.

This event will also be celebrating the winner of the 2019 Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize.  John Blair is the 2019 winner for his poem, “The Shape of things To Come.” John and judge Natalia Treviño will be in attendance. Other featured readers include Wendy Goodman (Kingston, MD), Shelli Cornelison, Diana Conces, Ed O’Casey, Devin Guthrie, John Milkereit, Benjamin Nash, Margie McCreles Roe, Steve Wilson, and Sean Winn. Members of the Kallisto Gaia Press editorial staff and board of directors will be available for a Q&A after the event. Light fare will be served.

Feb
23
Sun
The South Austin Writers Workshop
Feb 23 @ 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

The South Austin Writers Workshop is a creative writing group of dedicated writers. Along with their current instructor, Shannon Perri, they meet monthly to read, write, and share their work amongst each other. Now, they’re excited to share some of their work with family, friends, and the local literary community. Join us for a reading of their wonderful writing!

Feb
29
Sat
Julie Howd Chapbook Launch
Feb 29 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of Julie Howd’s chapbook, Threshold (Host Publications).

Host Publications is honored to award Julie Howd’s chapbook Threshold as the recipient of the Spring 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. Our chapbook prize embodies our values as a small, community-oriented press by elevating the voices of women writers. The prize awards publication, $1000, 25 copies of the published chapbook, a book launch at Malvern Books, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion.

Julie Howd is a poet from Massachusetts. Her first chapbook, Talking from the Knees Up, was published by dancing girl press in 2018. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received the 2015 Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Creative Arts. Her work can be found in DelugeThe SpectacleSixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives in Amherst, MA.

Mar
1
Sun
Sarah Harris Wallman Book Launch
Mar 1 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of Sarah Harris Wallman’s story collection Senseless Women, winner of the 2019 Juniper Prize for Fiction. With readings from Sarah and guests Ashleigh Pedersen and Jaime DeBlanc-Knowles.

Exploring the darker side of optimism, Sarah Harris Wallman’s debut collection shows women attempting to build durable havens from reality, struggling to keep relationships intact, and reinventing themselves. A lonely music teacher at a Nashville Christian academy awaits the miracle of love; a Jane Doe recalls the affair that sustained—and ended—her; a new mother brings life into the world during a bleak election party; young girls are exploited by a nightclub owner in death, as in life. Alone or in weird sisterhood, some of these women are senseless because they refuse to feel, others because they’ve been deprived of stimuli and attention. As these twelve stories prove, there’s no sensible way to fall in love, raise children, or escape (even dead girls have to go on stage and sing for their supper). This is Senseless Women.

Sarah Harris Wallman grew up in Nashville, TN, though she has also lived in Arkansas, New York City, and Glastonbury, UK (that’s where King Arthur was buried). She has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and currently teaches in the MFA program at Albertus Magnus college in New Haven, CT. Her stories have received awards from the Tucson Festival of Books and Prada.

Ashleigh Pedersen’s fiction has been featured in New Stories from the South, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Design Observer, The Silent HistoryA Strange Object, and the New York Public Library’s Library Simplified app. Her story “Small and Heavy World” was a finalist for both Best American Short Stories and a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was the recipient of a full scholarship and teaching fellowship as well as the Turow-Kinder Award. She just completed her first novel and can occasionally be spotted in Austin theater and film projects.


Jaime deBlanc-Knowles holds an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in Post Road and Meridian, and she has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Lighthouse Works Fellowship. She currently teaches creative writing workshops through UT Informal Classes, the Writing Barn, and Fresh Ink.

Mar
9
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse: Reading & Open Mic
Mar 9 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by Charlotte Gullick. 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 Tommy Mouton.

Tommy Mouton is a Southern writer and a writing coach. A former John Steinbeck Fellow (2013-2014), his work appears in Auburn Avenue, Reed, and Callaloo. A dynamic dramatic reader, his work has been featured in venues hosted by KKUP 91.5 “Out of Our Minds” Poetry Radio, Sacramento Stories on Stage, LitQuake, Center for Literary Arts, Poetry Center San José, and a host of others. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, raised in the unincorporated community of Moss Bluff (the principal setting of his memoir-in-progress and the inspiration for much of this work), Tommy recently, as of July 2018, relocated to Austin from San José, CA—with his wife and three children. He currently teaches creative writing and composition at Huston-Tillotson University. This is his first Austin reading invitation.

Jul
24
Fri
Harold Whit Williams: An Evening of Poetry & Song
Jul 24 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Malvern Books is proud to present an evening (via Zoom; details to come) with Cotton Mather guitarist and prize-winning poet Harold Whit Williams, who will be reading from his new book and performing songs from his new solo album, both titled My Heavens.

Worth noting: All royalties from the download or stream of My Heavens goes to Color of Change.

Williams returns to form on this, his fifth poetry collection. The very idea of a paradise—beyond sky or upon earth or within each moment—is poked and prodded with both sharp cynicism and wide-eyed wonder alike. Addressing grief, the day in/day out depictions are deeply distilled, the lines sober yet also playful, loose and languid. Nostalgia without sentimentality. Dreamlike visions without surrealism. These poems settle down across the kitchen table from a reader for a little give and take, a little what’s it all about? “The transubstantiation, the utter mystery,” Williams writes, “I swallow it all/And expect nothing in return.”

* * *

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Aug
1
Sat
David Meischen Austin Book Launch
Aug 1 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of David Meischen’s Anyone’s Son: Poems. (This event will take place via Zoom; details to come.)

From the rural South Texas of the nineteen fifties to a desert mesa in New Mexico many years later, Anyone’s Son illuminates the moments of a life animated by the author’s yearning, at its root sexual, for the company of another man. In five sections, each one corresponding to a stage in the life delineated here, the author offers scenes from his childhood on a small farm, as well as moments of conflicted adolescence. He explores unmitigated sexual pleasure, sometimes fraught with anguish and shame. He remembers scenes from marriage and fatherhood, from the wreckage and rebuilding that came at midlife. And finally, glimpses from a second marriage, this time unconflicted, to a man, to the right man. At its heart, Anyone’s Son poses an implicit question: What is identity?

David Meischen has been honored by a Pushcart Prize for “How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You,” a chapter of his memoir, originally published in The Gettysburg Review and available in Pushcart Prize XLII. With three decades of poetry publication credits, David is dedicated to the narrative form. In the summer of 2020, Storylandia, Issue 34, will be entirely his work—The Distance Between Here and Elsewhere: Three Stories. Recipient of the 2017 Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters, David has fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in The Common, Copper Nickel, The Evansville Review, Salamander, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere. He has served as a juror for the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and in the fall of 2018, he completed a writing residency at Jentel Arts. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, David lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.

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Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbigMUsjuS

Aug
28
Fri
ArmadilloCon 42
Aug 28 – Aug 30 all-day

ArmadilloCon 42 is virtual and free this year! ArmadilloCon celebrates a broad range of SFF/speculative fiction books and art. Visit our virtual booth and check out our ArmadilloCon page for discounts, books, videos and more.

Sep
4
Fri
Ute Carson Book Launch
Sep 4 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Ute Carson’s Gypsy Spirit, a lifelong collection of published short stories, flash stories, essays, commentaries, and memoir.

Gypsy Spirit is an extraordinary mix of memoir, history, photography, and poetry—I have never seen anything like it. The book revolves around family, living and dead, rendered in rich and sensuous detail. We meet Carson’s German grandparents and parents who are living, dying, and suffering during and after World War II. We meet her husband, children and grandchildren as they are growing up and thriving in contemporary Texas. It is hard to describe the richness, passion, history, suffering and love in Gypsy Spirit. Readers will have to discover for themselves.
—Thomas R. Cole, author of
No Color is My Kind

A writer from youth and an M.A. graduate in comparative literature from the University of Rochester, German-born Ute Carson published her first prose piece in 1977. Colt Tailing, a 2004 novel, was a finalist for the Peter Taylor Book Award. Carson’s story “The Fall” won Outrider Press’s Grand Prize and appeared in its short story and poetry anthology A Walk through My Garden, 2007. Her second novel In Transit was published in 2008. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines in the US and abroad. Carson’s poetry was featured on the televised Spoken Word Showcase 2009, 2010, 2011, Channel Austin. A poetry collection Just a Few Feathers was published in 2011. The poem “A Tangled Nest of Moments” placed second in the Eleventh International Poetry Competition 2012. Her chapbook Folding Washing was published in 2013 and her collection of poems My Gift to Life was nominated for the 2015 Pushcart Award Prize. Save the Last Kiss, a novella, was published in 2016. Her poetry collection Reflections was out in 2018. She received the Ovidiu-Bektore Literary Award 2018 from the Anticus Mulicultural Association in Constanta, Romania. In 2018 she was nominated a second time for the Pushcart Award Prize by the PlainView Press. Gypsy Spirit was published in 2020.

Ute Carson resides in Austin, Texas with her husband. They have three daughters, six grandchildren, a horse and a clowder of cats.

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Sep
5
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Sep 5 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

The Lion & the Pirate set off on their next online adventure, hope you’ll be aboard!

We’ll start with two featured readers (TBA), and then it will be your time to shine. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. As we found last time, Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

* * *

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Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

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Sep
12
Sat
The Ocotillo Review Volume 4.2 Featuring Gary V. Powell
Sep 12 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of the summer 2020 issue of Kallisto Gaia Press’ literary journal, The Ocotillo Review. This event will take place via Zoom and feature the winner of their debut chapbook contest, Gary V. Powell (below), reading from his winning collection, Super Blood Wolf Moon. The event will also include readings by over thirty poets and writers from The Ocotillo Review.

We will have copies of the journal available at the store; call us at 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up. 

The Ocotillo Review features over 100 pages of literary genius by award-winning writers from around the world and superb new pieces by writers from underserved communities.

Gary V. Powell’s fiction can be read in many literary journals including the Thomas Wolfe Review, Carvezine, Fiction Southeast, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Best New Writing 2015, and Pisgah Review. His first novel, Lucky Bastard, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing (2012). Two collections of previously-published short stories, Beyond Redemption and Getting Even and Other Stories, were released in 2015 and 2019, respectively. His poetry has appeared at One Minute Magazine and Live Nude Poems.

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Sep
18
Fri
Ross Wilcox Book Launch
Sep 18 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of Ross Wilcox’s debut short story collection, Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society: Stories. Ross will be joined by Josh Denslow, author of Not Everyone Is Special, and their publisher, Leland Cheuk, founder of 7.13 Books.

This event will take place via Zoom—details below. Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society: Stories can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

A battle of wills emerges when one of the suicide survivors in the Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society turns the meetings into a yoga class. A small town is gripped by a lawn ornamentation craze. A woman dresses up as Paul Bunyan to rob banks to pay her ailing mother’s exorbitant nursing home bills. A married couple decides to 3-D print a son… and his entire childhood. Golden Gate Jumper Survivors Society is a funny and poignant story collection about everyday people confronting everyday challenges with escalating absurdity. Reminiscent of the work of Aimee Bender, Ross Wilcox’s stories will make you view the mundane in an entirely new way.

Ross Wilcox is from Elk Point, South Dakota. He teaches at the University of North Texas. His stories have appeared in numerous literary journals. He lives in Fort Worth with his wife and two elderly cats (17 and 13!). Currently, he’s at work on a novel.


Josh Denslow is the author of the collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books). Recent stories have appeared in Catapult, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Hobart, and Pithead Chapel. In addition to exploring dungeons in the Legend of Zelda with his three boys, he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane.


A MacDowell and Hawthornden Castle Fellow, Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books, most recently the novel NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in NPR, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon. He founded the indie press 7.13 Books.

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Oct
1
Thu
Liliana Valenzuela’s Codex of Love
Oct 1 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the recent release of Liliana Valenzuela’s Codex of Love: Bendita ternura. Liliana will be joined by poets jo reyes-boitel and Edward Vidaurre.

This event will take place via Zoom; please see details below. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

Codex of Love: Bendita ternura is a migration of spirit. Liliana Valenzuela takes us by the hand and shows us where she comes from, where she’s been, and where she is through a collection that at times reads like a song and other times like a prayer. Valenzuela’s voice whispers to us and gives us pleasure. She is kind in her sensuality and transcendent in matters of the heart. The five sections in the collection are as visual as they are thought-provoking, through a metaphorical journey that’s tender and urgent. A well thought and well written poetic entrée for the starving reader.

jo reyes-boitel is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Somehow born in Minnesota, her family calls Texas, Florida, Mexico, and Cuba home. jo’s most recent work is “she wears bells,” a hybrid operetta rooted in the story of Coyolxauhqui, which imagines her after her dismemberment and exile on the moon. The piece combines music, spoken word, voice, and choreography. It will be performed in October by theater students at Palo Alto Community College in San Antonio, TX. jo’s first book, Michael + Josephine, was published by FlowerSong Press in 2019. jo is now at work on their second book and a chapbook and maybe a novella.


Edward Vidaurre is the author of seven collections of poetry. He is the 2018-2019 City of McAllen, Texas Poet Laureate, a four-time Pushcart-nominated poet, and publisher of FlowerSong Press. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, The Texas Observer, Grist, Poet Lore, The Acentos Review, Poetrybay, Voices de la Luna, as well as other journals and anthologies. Vidaurre is from Boyle Heights, California and now resides in McAllen, Texas with his wife and daughter.

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Oct
3
Sat
Scott Semegran Book Launch
Oct 3 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the launch of Scott Semegran’s eighth book, The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island. With readings from Scott and special guest Charlotte Gullick. This event will take place via Zoom; please see details below.

The summer of 1986. Central Texas. William and his friends should be having a blast. Instead, they are hounded by the Thousand Oaks Gang and their merciless leader, Bloody Billy. William found Billy’s backpack. And because of what it contains, Billy desperately wants it back, and he’ll do anything to get it. William hatches a plan for his friends to sneak away and hide in an abandoned lake house, except they become stranded on the lake’s desolate island without food or water. Will their time on the island devolve into chaos? Will the friends survive and be rescued?

The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island is Lord of the Flies meets The Body by Stephen King, the inspiration for the classic movie Stand By Me.

A gripping suspense story with adventure and danger, tinged with humorous banter between the four friends, the middle schoolers face certain death without adults to protect them from the unrelenting natural elements, as well as the wild creatures that lurk in the wilderness around the lake. With a backpack filled with money and marijuana they stole from the merciless gang leader, it’s only a matter of time before the high schoolers come looking for them, too.

From award-winning writer Scott Semegran, The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island is Semegran’s response to William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, which was Golding’s response to The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, an adventure novel from 1858. All three novels tackle the premise of boys stranded on an island, with Semegran’s novel taking a decidedly modern view of a group of friends in Central Texas during the summer of 1986 working to survive in a situation filled with danger and desperation with only each other to rely on.

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 previous novel, To Squeeze a Prairie Dog: An American Novel, was the 2019 Readers’ Favorite International Book Award Winner: Silver Medal for Fiction – Humor/Comedy, the 2019 Texas Author Project Winner for Adult Fiction, and the 2020 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Medal Winner for Humor. His book Sammie & Budgie was the first place winner for Fiction in the 2018 Texas Authors Book Awards. His book BOYS was the 2018 IndieReader Discovery Awards winner for Short Stories. 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.

Charlotte Gullick is the Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College, and she holds a MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis and a MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her first novel, By Way of Water, was chosen by Jayne Anne Phillips as Grand Prize Winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project. Her other awards include a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship in Fiction a MacDowell Colony Residency, a Ragdale Residency, as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus,and the LA Review.

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Oct
4
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Oct 4 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

The Lion & the Pirate set off on their next online adventure, hope you’ll be aboard!

We’ll start with featured reader and L&P regular, Edith Tapia “Blackbird”!

About: Edith was born in her beloved country Mexico. She started to participate in local events since elementary school, like “Civil Mondays,” writing patriotic and traditional poems to perform for government members. In middle school, Edith competed in a statewide poetry contest, winning second place. In high school, she won second place in a nationwide poetry contest. The Sonora University awarded her an honorable mention for her participation in their literary regional contest with the piece “Plegarias de Una Luna Enamorada,” and Edith was published in their anthology, Realidad Aleatoria.

Now living in the USA, Edith attends open mics sharing her bilingual work. She has been featured twice for the “Austin Poetry Society” monthly event in 2018 and also published in their anthology in 2020. She has won the Ekphrastic challenge in the “Hearsay Poetry” open mic three times and been published on hearsaypoetry.com

Read Edith’s poems at https://medium.com/@blackbird.ville and https://www.wattpad.com/user/EBlackbird.

Then it will be your time to shine. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

* * *

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event.

Oct
8
Thu
Catherine A. Hamilton Austin Book Launch
Oct 8 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the Austin launch of Catherine A. Hamilton’s debut novel, Victoria’s War. This novel gives voice to the courageous Polish women who were kidnapped into real-life Nazi slave labor operations during WWII. Inspired by true stories, this lost chapter of history won’t soon be forgotten again.

This event will take place via Zoom; details below. The book can be purchased via our online store here, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

POLAND, 1939: Nineteen-year-old Victoria Darski is eager to move away to college: her bags are packed and her train ticket is in hand. But instead of boarding a train to the University of Warsaw, she finds her world turned upside down when World War II breaks out. Victoria’s father is sent to a raging battlefront, and the Darski women must face the cruelty of the invaders without him. When Victoria decides to go to a resistance meeting with her best friend, Sylvia, they are captured by human traffickers targeting Polish teenagers. Sylvia is sent to work in a brothel, and Victoria is transported by cattle car to Berlin, where she is auctioned off as a slave.

GERMANY, 1941: Twenty-year-old Etta Tod is at Mercy Hospital about to undergo involuntary sterilization because of the Fuhrer’s mandate to eliminate hereditary deafness. Etta, an artist, silently critiques the propaganda poster on the waiting room wall while her mother tries to convince her she should be glad to get rid of her monthlies. Etta is the daughter of the German shopkeeper who buys Victoria at auction in Berlin.

The stories of Victoria and Etta intertwine in the bakery’s attic where Victoria is held—the same place where Etta has hidden her anti-Nazi paintings. The two women form a quick and enduring bond. But when they’re caught stealing bread from the bakery and smuggling it to a nearby work camp, everything changes.

A native Oregonian of Polish descent, Catherine A. Hamilton was born in the small town of Sweet Home, Oregon. After finishing high school, she moved to Portland where she graduated from Lewis and Clark College in 1984 with a Master’s degree in psychology. She spent 12 years as a psychotherapist, publishing dozens of articles in her field. She presented papers at the American Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting in New York City, and one article was featured in the NYT the following day. After joining a writing group and trying her hand at fiction, her stories, articles, and poems were published in magazines and newspapers—including the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the Oregonian, the Catholic Sentinel, and the Polish American Journal. She closed her private practice and started writing fiction full-time. A local talk-news show interviewed Catherine on radio and television about a piece she wrote for Brainstorm Magazine, and she was also interviewed for TV after the death of Pope John Paul II. She had met the pope in his private library while on pilgrimage in Rome, and had presented him with some of her work. She also has a chapter in the book Forgotten Survivors (University Press of Kansas, 2004).

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Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
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Oct
10
Sat
Book Launch: What Remains by Claudia Delfina Cardona
Oct 10 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us as we virtually celebrate the winner of the Fall 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, What Remains by Claudia Delfina Cardona.

What Remains is a collection of poems propelled by impulse, desire and an ancestral sense of longing. These poems are experiential; they exist within the dark and splendid catacombs of the body, in dusty moonlit Texas nights, and invite us into their own glittery mythos of what it means to be a young woman falling in and out of love in San Antonio.

This collection begins with a portrait of a Brown girl growing up in San Antonio: a girl whose “tongue [is] burnt from gas station coffee,” and who wears “a name dipped in gold.” She invites us to “lay [our] head / on [her] chest and listen,” to stir “your margarita / with a chamoy-coated straw”, and to play “a guessing game of gunshot / or firework.” We settle into the rich and storied landscape of San Antonio just in time to be lunged into a dimension of lust, loving, and longing, “toward someplace too dark for us to see—”, only to return to what remains.

Claudia Delfina Cardona is a poet born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. She received her B.A. from St. Mary’s University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University. In 2013, she co-founded Chifladazine alongside Laura Valdez, a zine that highlights creative work by Latinas and Latinxs. In 2019, she co-founded Infrarrealista Review, a literary journal for all types of Texan writers, with Linda Rivas Vázquez. Cardona loves music and films as much as she loves poetry. She is an aspiring DJ and cultural critic.

The Zoom link will be provided on this page a few days before the event. Please note: all guests will be muted during the event.

Nov
1
Sun
Borderlands: Issue 52 Launch Party
Nov 1 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Copies will be available for purchase at the store.

To watch this reading, please go to the Youtube live event on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCclZdTQQCBXU1-PN9dBPR6g. If you have problems accessing the event, email becky@malvernbooks.com.

The issue’s keynote poet is Octavio Quintanilla.

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), and served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Texas Highways, RHINO, The Rumpus, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere. His visual poems have been exhibited in several galleries, including Presa House Gallery, Equinox Gallery, and at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, TX. He holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

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

Nov
7
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Nov 7 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

The Lion & the Pirate set off on their next online adventure, hope you’ll be aboard!

We’ll start with two featured readers (TBA), and then it will be your time to shine. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event.

Nov
19
Thu
Celebrating Reading Quirks
Nov 19 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in celebrating the release of Reading Quirks, a witty and light-hearted ode to the immense pleasure of reading and its resulting byproduct: neurosis. This event will feature author Andrés de la Casa Huertas.

This event will take place via Zoom; see details below. The book can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up or make an appointment to visit the store.

Who hasn’t peeked over the shoulder of the person reading next to them on the subway, curious about the book in their hands? Who doesn’t secretly love skipping the party to stay home and read? Who hasn’t daydreamed of catching the eye of a future significant other as you discover from across the room that you’re reading the same book? If you’re a reader, you know you’ve been there, and probably in so many other weird places as well, right? That’s what happens with readers, they have these strange traits, these particular ways, that separate them from the rest. Reading Quirks explores, in 72 lighthearted four-frame cartoons, all these weird things readers do, from the existential dilemma of picking your next read to the frustrations of watching an overzealous dog-earer in action. The series was written and created by a bookstore in Dallas, The Wild Detectives, originally as a social media campaign―a way to connect with other readers over a shared understanding of what it means to be crazy about books. Laura Pacheco’s adorable illustrations introduce a cast of endearing characters, whose flaws and obsessions range from disarming good nature to mischievous playfulness.

Reading Quirks is a work of nonfiction. You have in your hands an anthropological study of a strange and far-ranging human tribe, a tribe that gets from the reading of books the kind of happiness that other people derive from wrestling alligators. —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Beautiful Country Burn Again

Authors Andrés de la Casa Huertas and Javier García del Moral are Spanish expats and longtime friends who run The Wild Detectives as creative and executive directors, respectively. They combine these efforts with their day jobs in advertising the former, and civil engineering the latter. Reading Quirks is their first publication.

Laura Pacheco is an awarded Spanish illustrator and cartoonist. She’s the author of several graphic novels in Spain, such as Señor Pacheco: agente secreto (¡Caramba!, 2013) and Problemas del primer mundo (Lumen, 2014). Along with her sister, the author Carmen Pacheco, they’ve also published Una semana en familia (¡Caramba!, 2011), Troll Corporation (¡Caramba!, 2018) and Divas de diván (¡Caramba!, 2018).

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Dec
12
Sat
2021 Texas Poetry Calendar Reading
Dec 12 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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!

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting here.

Meeting ID: 282 978 3950
Password: 788597

Jan
2
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Jan 2 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Ready for the Lion & Pirate in 2021? We are! Start the new year off with your inclusive open mic pals (and tell Laura happy birthday)!

We’ll start with two featured readers, and then it will be your time to shine. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85323118334
Meeting ID: 853 2311 8334
Password: 146923

Feb
7
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Feb 7 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate inclusive open mic in February for our SIXTH birthday (what??? It’s true)! BYOCake!

Our featured performer this month is Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson! The San Antonio, TX 2020-2023 Poet Laureate, Andrea teaches poetry workshops, mentors, builds up and encourages artists to pursue their art, and gives them platforms to showcase their talent. Her debut book, entitled She Lives in Music, published on Flower Song Press, was released on Valentine’s Day 2020. Her album She Tastes Like Music is available on all music streaming platforms.

Then it will be your time to shine! Sign up to PERFORM by noon, Feb. 6th: https://forms.gle/ztjmnhAHRfZCe3Wt5

As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… Anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: we’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so we’ll screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e (and let us know if you have questions).

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

Mar
13
Sat
Brian Phillip Whalen Book Launch
Mar 13 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us for a Zoom reading to celebrate the recent launch of Brian Phillip Whalen’s SEMIOTIC LOVE [STORIES]. Featuring Brian, plus special guests Amy Long and Richard Z. Santos.

SEMIOTIC LOVE [STORIES] draws upon symbols and objects to explore the loss of relationships. In these pages, Brian Phillip Whalen reaches deep into the throat of anxiety with a graceful hand and understated humor as he confronts mothers and best friends dying slow or sudden deaths, disappointing vacations, and vanishing sisters. While loss of all kinds permeates these compact stories, it is the tenderness and longing that attaches itself to the reader and propels them to turn the page. This book reminds us that for better or for worse, we’re all a little rougher with the people we love the most.

Brian Phillip Whalen’s work can be found in The Southern Review, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, the Flash Nonfiction Food anthology, and elsewhere. Brian holds a PhD from the State University of New York at Albany and is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency. He lives with his wife and daughter in Tuscaloosa where he teaches creative and first-year writing at The University of Alabama. This is his first book.

Amy Long is the author of Codependence (2019), chosen by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. She is a contributing editor to the drug history blog Points and runs the Instagram account @taylorswift_as_books. Her work has appeared in Diagram, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, including as a Notable essay in Best American Essays 2019.

Richard Z. Santos is a writer and teacher in Austin. His debut novel, Trust Me, was published in March 2020. He is a Board Member of The National Book Critics Circle and served as one of the 2019 Nonfiction Judges for The Kirkus Prize. Recent work can be found in Texas Monthly, Awst Press, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, and many more. In a previous career he worked for some of the nation’s top political campaigns, consulting firms, and labor unions.

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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 886 5814 1152
Passcode: 644097

Mar
20
Sat
lily someson Chapbook Launch
Mar 20 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Spring 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, lily someson’s mistaken for loud comets.

Copies of the book are available for purchase at the store, or online via bookshop.org.

* * * To view this event live on Feb 27th at 7pm, please visit our YouTube channel. * * *

mistaken for loud comets is a collection of poems that intertwines experiences around incarceration, queerness, and the Black body in America. In this chapbook, lily someson leads us through the Indiana dunes, into dusk air as incarcerated men are beamed into the heavens, and into the rooms of a house she built around herself, creating “a world without confinement.” someson’s poetic genius can be felt in her fortitude—she embraces the storm with startling empathy, and within these poems, offers up her most vulnerable moments alongside her most resolute proclamations of selfhood, claiming space on the page as if fighting for her birthright. Exploring the outermost limits of identity with a gentle, inquiring mind, someson lets the poems in mistaken for loud comets be “everything/ all at once.”

lily someson (she/they) is a poet and essayist from Chicago. She has obtained a B.A. in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and is a winner of the 2020 Eileen Lannan poetry prize with the Academy of American Poets. She has read at the Poetry Foundation’s Open Door Reading Series and has also been published/is forthcoming in Court Green, Queeriosity (Young Chicago Authors), and Columbia Poetry Review, among others. She is currently a first-year Poetry MFA student at Vanderbilt University and an assistant poetry editor of the Nashville Review.

Apr
3
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Apr 3 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for their next inclusive open mic! This month, they’re pleased to present featured readings by winners from the 2020 Pen2Paper creative writing contest.

Then it will be your time to shine! As always, they’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

Harold Whit Williams Book Launch
Apr 3 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Harold Whit Williams’ first book of short stories, Mel Bay’s Book of the Dead.

Copies of the book are available for purchase at the store, or online via bookshop.org.

Harold Whit Williams is a prize-winning poet and longtime guitarist for the indie rock band Cotton Mather. He is the recipient of the 2020 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. The author of five books of poetry, Williams lives in Austin, Texas where he records lo-fi music as Daily Worker and catalogs the KUT Collection for the University of Texas Libraries.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89986872541?pwd=VStJZ2g3UEQvWEd5aGYrbFNZTWxCQT09

Meeting ID: 899 8687 2541
Passcode: 439787

May
1
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
May 1 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

This month, we’re pleased to present featured readings by winners from the 2020 Pen2Paper creative writing contest, Edie Bakker and Lucia Gagliese!

Edie Bakker (3rd Place in Poetry for “Grappling with Dissociative Identity Disorder”) was raised in Papua New Guinea, the daughter of anthropologist/missionaries. Edie led two expeditions to save a rainforest and wrote about them for National Geographic magazine. She has a Bachelor’s in Anthropology and has the equivalent of an FMA. Edie has written seven books, short stories, and poems.

Lucia Gagliese (2nd Place in Fiction for “The Caregiver”) is a clinical psychologist and professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her work focuses on pain, aging, and end of life care. She studied creative writing at the Humber School for Writers and her fiction has appeared in The Healing Muse and is forthcoming in The Leaf. “The Caregiver” is a health narrative that integrates her clinical and research interests with her personal experience of losing a friend to ALS.

After Edie and Lucia, it will be your time to shine! Sign up to PERFORM by noon Apr. 30: https://forms.gle/ryoqXSaLbuEi7jQR6. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

Jun
1
Tue
Julie Poole Book Launch
Jun 1 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Julie Poole’s Bright Specimen (Deep Vellum). With readings from Julie and guest Taisia Kitaiskaia.

With the loving eye of an amateur botanist, poet Julie Poole has distilled nature to its finest, tender points. Through poems spread delicately across the page, interspersed with images of the pressed flowers themselves, Poole’s poetry gives voice to a meditative expression of flora. Each poem creates an individual cataloged world through which to explore the body, sexuality, strength, and a devout refusal to admit the separation between humans and nature. Inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the largest herbaria in the Southwestern United States, Bright Specimen weaves together a written index through the harmony of botanical wonder.

Julie Poole was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poems, Bright Specimen, was inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin. She has received scholarships and fellowship support from the James A. Michener Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, 100 West, and Yaddo. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. She lives in Austin with her growing collection of found butterflies.

Taisia Kitaiskaia is a Russian-American poet and writer. She is the author of The Nightgown and Other Poems; Literary Witches, a collaboration with artist Katy Horan; a divination deck, The Literary Witches Oracle; and two books of advice from the Slavic folklore witch Baba Yaga, Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles and its follow-up, Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga. Her work has been published in A Public Space, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence, Guernica, and elsewhere and her work has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Austin, TX.

Zoom information:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81595707311?pwd=R1BoWU9wT0JEQXF4RUhIMmYwS1EzQT09

Meeting ID: 815 9570 7311
Passcode: 232562

Jun
6
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Jun 6 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic!

This month, we’re pleased to present featured readings by winners from the 2020 Pen 2 Paper creative writing contest: Jasmine Ledesma (1st Place in Non-fiction for “How Sad, How Lovely”) and Pat Hulsebosch (2nd Place in Non-fiction for “Watch Closely”)!

Then it will be your time to shine! Sign up to PERFORM by noon, June 5th at https://docs.google.com/…/1FAIpQLSdK9xgG9ftI22…/viewform. As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

Jul
3
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Jul 3 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! This month, we’re pleased to present featured performances by Pen 2 Paper alum, writer, and performer Maria Palacios!

After Maria, it will be your time to shine! As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Sign up by noon, July 2nd, at: https://forms.gle/CL22HgqutgtoNrDu8.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

Jul
6
Tue
Jason Marc Harris Book Launch with Lowell Mick White
Jul 6 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Jason Marc Harris’ novella Master of Rods and Strings. With readings from Jason and guest Lowell Mick White.

Jason Marc Harris graduated with a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Washington, and an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University, where he served as Fiction Editor of Mid-American Review. Creative work in journals such as Apex and Abyss, Arroyo Literary Review, Bull, Cheap Pop, EveryDay Fiction, Marvels and Tales, Masque and Spectacle, Midwestern Gothic, The Offbeat, Psychopomp Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and Writing Texas. His novella Master of Rods and Strings (Vernacular Books) is available by print and Kindle on July 6th, 2021. He teaches creative writing, folklore, and literature at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

Lowell Mick White is the author of six books: novels Normal School, ProfessedBurnt House, and That Demon Life, and story collections Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives. A winner of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, White teaches at Texas A&M University.


Zoom information:

Meeting ID: 854 0554 3302
Passcode: 411104
Aug
1
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Aug 1 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Sign up to perform here by noon, July 31st.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

Sep
4
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Sep 4 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

Sign up to perform here by noon, September 3rd.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

ZOOM link to be posted closer to the event; please check the Facebook event for the link.

Sep
13
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Eva Shelton
Sep 13 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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

Meeting ID: 919 3115 7006
Passcode: 504435

Sep
25
Sat
Borderlands Pre-Release Reading
Sep 25 @ 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Join members of the Borderlands staff and poets from the forthcoming Issue 53 in the first of two virtual send-off events for the journal. While Issue 53 won’t be published until late October, the work these poets share will get you excited for our final release. Come get a sneak peak of the incredible poems that we’ll feature in our last issue of the journal. This is one of the last two events Borderlands will produce, and we look forward to your presence as we celebrate the journal’s history and legacy. This event will take place via Zoom, details to come.

Zoom Info:
Oct
2
Sat
Marian Schwartz Book Launch with Philip Boehm
Oct 2 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84460923645?pwd=eHp4L2x3ZW5ERHJoL0oxKzdheGU1dz09

Meeting ID: 844 6092 3645
Passcode: 384198

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

Oct
18
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Stephanie Macias
Oct 18 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86887318364?pwd=M2hreGFQRTlsR0c3VkpDL2VkbjRrZz09

Meeting ID: 868 8731 8364
Passcode: 914142

Oct
24
Sun
Borderlands Issue 53 Reading
Oct 24 @ 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Join members of the Borderlands staff and poets from Issue 53. This is the last event Borderlands will produce, and we look forward to your presence as we celebrate the journal’s history and legacy. This event will take place via Zoom, details to come.

Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89765504015?pwd=dkNMUkpGNDUxQ2lMaWM3b043cXNUUT09

Meeting ID: 897 6550 4015
Passcode: 033640

Nov
6
Sat
Sequoia Maner’s Little Girl Blue: Poems Chapbook Launch
Nov 6 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

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.

The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Nov 6 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted soon on Facebook.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Nov
8
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Kendra Christel
Nov 8 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82680032230?pwd=bk8ySVZtbkxCTUljZ0thMlZJUFgxQT09

Meeting ID: 826 8003 2230
Passcode: 171138

Nov
17
Wed
Awst Press Reading with Donald Quist, Andrew Yoon, & Esteban Rodríguez
Nov 17 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82288354224?pwd=L2ttY3VkOXVKenV4SlRpRTk5S09tZz09

Meeting ID: 822 8835 4224
Passcode: 186776

Nov
19
Fri
Book Launch for Leticia Urieta’s Las Criaturas
Nov 19 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83908808756?pwd=bTcwVkRNSjBGZFhjeXJHMndZNlpsQT09

Meeting ID: 839 0880 8756
Passcode: 388053

 

Dec
5
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Dec 5 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted soon on Facebook.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Dec
6
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Maurice Chammah
Dec 6 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82105197585?pwd=V0x0RHN4UXJuWURIK1JadWc2QzZCQT09

Meeting ID: 821 0519 7585
Passcode: 311990

Dec
12
Sun
Texas Poetry Calendar Reading
Dec 12 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm

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!

Join Zoom meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87611534672?pwd=QjhlS0R0RlZOOFRGS2VsRFhaOUFFZz09

Meeting ID: 876 1153 4672
Passcode: 393183

Jan
29
Sat
John Sibley Williams Book Launch with Chloe Martinez & Esteban Rodriguez
Jan 29 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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

Feb
5
Sat
Kallisto Gaia Press Chapbook Launch with KB & Renee Rossi
Feb 5 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

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:

Meeting ID: 842 7243 5809
Passcode: 832699

 

The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Feb 5 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

For our featured performance to kick off the year, we’re welcoming back Oli Steck, a musician, actor, and entertainer. He plays various instruments, with various styles of music, with many different groups. He honed his timing, sense of music, entertainment, and theater, by playing in the streets, clubs, theaters, homes and spaces of the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. Since 2002, he has lived and performed mainly in Austin, Tx. Some of the performers he works with locally are Bob Schneider, Slaid Cleaves, Guy Forsyth, Rey Arteaga, and the Moon Tower Brass Band. Catch Oli working as a solo performer streaming 2 live shows from his homepage on Facebook: “The Squirrel Show” (Thursdays at 7:30pm CST), and “The Kids’ Show” (Saturdays at 10am).

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted soon on Facebook.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Feb
7
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Dalia Azim
Feb 7 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88095180404?pwd=bTRLVGNpOXdqREdiQWJCNEVMUlJmQT09

Meeting ID: 880 9518 0404
Passcode: 590739

Feb
26
Sat
E.C. Belli Austin Book Launch
Feb 26 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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.

* * *

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82936043761?pwd=T1lnS2JyMDl4UTRNWHpJdCtpVldPUT09

Meeting ID: 829 3604 3761
Passcode: 703398

Feb
27
Sun
Book Launch: Maria Wells’ Images in the Clouds
Feb 27 @ 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm

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:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88658006464?pwd=Tm5oV1VPV1YzQWx1UWJqanZ3ZFRKUT09

Meeting ID: 886 5800 6464
Passcode: 341837

Mar
5
Sat
Maryan Nagy Captan’s Sixteen Rabbits Chapbook Launch
Mar 5 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us for a special online event to celebrate the launch of the winner of the Spring 2022 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Maryan Nagy Captan’s Sixteen Rabbits. Enjoy readings by Brittanie Sterner, Gabrielle Grace Hogan, Rob Colgate, Molly Williams, and Maryan Nagy Captan.

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

Sixteen Rabbits transports us through dream, memory, place and time, by opening portals that exist in the liminal space between two worlds. These meditative journeys spring from a deep nostalgia, and one of the most urgent expressions of longing in Captan’s work is that of the displaced, yearning for home. Through displacement, religious persecution, and trauma, these poems come shimmering forth ‘in full-bodied reverie,’ seeking divine wisdom which echoes throughout Sixteen Rabbits like a summons to see this moment, this place, this life in all of its enchantment. As Captan writes: ‘reverence, / I am writing with reverence.’

Maryan Nagy Captan is a poet, screenwriter, gardener, and birder living in Austin, TX. She is an alumnus of The Michener Center for Writers and the Disquiet International Literary Program.

Order a copy of Sixteen Rabbits by Maryan Nagy Captan here: https://hostpublications.com/products/sixteen-rabbits

Mar
6
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Mar 6 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted soon on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance/

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Tomás Q. Morín Book Launch with Laura Marris
Mar 6 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Join us via Zoom to celebrate the release of Tomás Q. Morín’s new memoir, Let Me Count the WaysLaura 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:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89944125202?pwd=WWhGTUk2TGgwWWRjVndBYnBWRXNyZz09

Meeting ID: 899 4412 5202
Passcode: 587107

Mar
21
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Adam Soto
Mar 21 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87969885873?pwd=K2FtK2JzNUdNR3JOVmRMSDYzQzl4Zz09

Meeting ID: 879 6988 5873
Passcode: 648283

Apr
2
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Apr 2 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted soon on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Apr
11
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Scott Semegran
Apr 11 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86910316763?pwd=dFBlS1NhYXNPNjA5ZHZWc0dTNUpIUT09

Meeting ID: 869 1031 6763
Passcode: 360355

May
8
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
May 8 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

This month’s open mic takes place on May 1, or May Day, a celebration of the season of spring! We can’t think of a better featured artist to commemorate this occasion than our dear friend, nature lover, and poet, Birdman 313!

After Birdman, it’s your turn on the mic! As always, we’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

May
12
Thu
Fernando A. Flores in Conversation with Edward Carey
May 12 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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:

Meeting ID: 865 1694 6507
Passcode: 888988
May
14
Sat
Laura Villareal Book Launch
May 14 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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.

Join Zoom Meeting:

Meeting ID: 860 3376 6552
Passcode: 470831
May
16
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Crisosto Apache
May 16 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:

Meeting ID: 875 1354 6544
Passcode: 944169

Jun
4
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Jun 4 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Jul
10
Sun
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Jul 10 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Jul
24
Sun
Rob Stanton Virtual Book Launch
Jul 24 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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

Aug
6
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Aug 6 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Sep
19
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Bianca Alyssa Pérez
Sep 19 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:

Oct
7
Fri
Rita Zoey Chin in Conversation with Cecily Sailer
Oct 7 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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

Oct
8
Sat
Malvern’s 9th Birthday Celebration
Oct 8 all-day

We’re celebrating our 9th birthday this weekend, October 8th and 9th! We’ll be open 11am – 5pm both days, and we’re offering 20% OFF EVERYTHING over our birthday weekend. Also worth noting: we’re donating all our Saturday proceeds to Avow Texas and Planned Parenthood.

Oct
9
Sun
Malvern’s 9th Birthday Celebration
Oct 9 all-day

We’re celebrating our 9th birthday this weekend, October 8th and 9th! We’ll be open 11am – 5pm both days, and we’re offering 20% OFF EVERYTHING over our birthday weekend. Also worth noting: we’re donating all our Saturday proceeds to Avow Texas and Planned Parenthood.

Oct
17
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Chaitali Sen
Oct 17 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:

Nov
5
Sat
Texas Book Festival
Nov 5 @ 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

We’ll be at the Texas Book Festival today, 10am – 5pm, booth #415. The festival is held in and around the State Capitol in downtown Austin. The Festival Weekend is FREE and open to the public, featuring nearly 300 authors of the year’s best books across all ages and genres. Hope to see you there!

Nov
6
Sun
Texas Book Festival
Nov 6 @ 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

We’ll be at the Texas Book Festival today, 11am – 5pm, booth #415. The festival is held in and around the State Capitol in downtown Austin. The Festival Weekend is FREE and open to the public, featuring nearly 300 authors of the year’s best books across all ages and genres. Hope to see you there!

The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Nov 6 @ 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Nov
12
Sat
Sophia Stid’s But for I Am a Woman Chapbook Launch
Nov 12 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

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.

Nov
14
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Raul Garza
Nov 14 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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:

 

Dec
3
Sat
The Lion & The Pirate Virtual Open Mic (Captioned)
Dec 3 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join the Lion & Pirate for our next inclusive open mic! As always, after our featured performer, it’s your time to shine! We’re open to work in any genre: music, spoken word, improv, skits, storytelling, dance, poems, or prose… anything you can perform!

The sign up form and Zoom link will be posted on Facebook.

Are you performing with an instrument or accompanying music? Optimize your sound: https://pfs.org/zoomperformance.

Accessibility adventure note: they’ll be using Rev for closed captions during the event. Rev isn’t great for music, so they will screen-share the lyrics of anything musical. You can still see the performer during songs, just follow these instructions for side-by-side screen sharing: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004802843-Side-by-Side-Mode-for-Screen-Sharing#h_7ebd355a-bdc4-489c-8193-63c4b063774e.

Dec
5
Mon
Austin Community College Literary Coffeehouse with Natalie Lima
Dec 5 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

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: