Welcome to Malvern Books!
Malvern 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
Join us in celebrating the launch of Hill Country Birds and Waters: Art and Poems, featuring poetry by Jim Blackburn and artwork by Isabelle Scurry Chapman.
Isabelle Scurry Chapman (a.k.a. Princie) makes art and looks for magic in life. Isabelle resides in Houston where she scours the landscape and old books for inspiration and spiritual connections. She has received a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts individual grant and has shown her work across Texas, the US, and Mexico. Her art is visceral, from the heart and of the spirit.
Jim Blackburn is an environmental lawyer and planner who teaches at Rice University in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He has published two books—The Book of Texas Bays and A Texan Plan for the Texas Coast. He is President of the Trinity Edwards Springs Protection Association (TESPA) that is focused on Hill Country water issues. He was designated a Rice University distinguished alumni laureate in 2018.
Join us for a reading with Dimitris Lyacos and Nick Courtright, and Katy Chrisler.
Dimitris Lyacos is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy (Z213: EXIT, With The People From The Bridge, The First Death). So far translated into thirteen languages, Poena Damni developed as a work in progress over the course of thirty years with subsequent editions and excerpts appearing in journals around the world, as well as in dialogue with a diverse range of sister projects it inspired. Renowned for combining, in a genre-defying form, themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology, the trilogy reexamines grand narratives in the context of some of the enduring motifs of the Western Canon, while, at the same time, being one of the most widely acclaimed avant-garde works published in the new millennium.
The long-time Co-Executive Editor of Gold Wake Press, Nick Courtright is Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. He is the author of Let There Be Light, called “a continual surprise and a revelation” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Boston Review, and The Kenyon Review, among many others. He is currently completing doctoral work at the University of Texas, and lives with his two children in East Austin.
Katy Chrisler received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held residencies with Land Arts of the American West and 100 West Corsicana. Recent work of hers has appeared in Tin House, Conflict of Interest, The Volta, and Black Warrior Review. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Join us for a reading from members of Donna M. Johnson’s literary nonfiction workshop. Readers TBA.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Lance Myers’s Why So Much?, the first publication of Austin-based publishing company Persistence of Vision. With readings from Lance and W. Joe Hoppe.
Debut author Lance Fever Myers paints the heartbreaking portrait of a teenage artist struggling to find her voice in a small refinery town off the Texas Gulf Coast. Why So Much? is an emotionally rich novel exploring sex, death, addiction, celebrity, and theme restaurants at the turn of the millennium. Think Vonnegut meets Jonathan Franzen.
Lance Myers has been a professional artist, writer, and animator for over twenty years. His traditional animation can be seen in the feature films Space Jam, Anastasia, Quest for Camelot, Prince of Egypt, and Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. His essays and comics have appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, The Austin Chronicle, JINX, and Powerball Magazine. He has also written and directed several short subject films which have shown on HBO, MTV, Adult Swim, PBS, and Canada’s Movieola. Myers was born in Lubbock but got to Austin as fast as he could. He currently teaches in the Communications Department at the University of Texas, and his debut novel, Why So Much? is now available through Persistence of Vision Publishing and in fine bookstores everywhere.
W. Joe Hoppe has taught Creative Writing and English at ACC since 1996. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, as well as two full-length poetry books: Galvanized (2007, Dalton Publishing), and Diamond Plate (2012, Obsolete Publishing). His new collection Hotrod Golgotha will be coming out soon. Joe was named Best Mopar Poet in the Austin Chronicle’s 2016 Best of Austin Awards.
It’s Bloomsday! Named for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloomsday is observed around the world on June 16th, as this is the date during which the events of Ulysses are relived (16th June, 1904). Join us for a celebration of the life of James Joyce, with short readings from Ulysses (sign up in store on the day if you’d like to read!) and suitably Irish snacks.
Join us in celebrating the release of Michael Parker’s highly acclaimed new novel, Prairie Fever, a moving, funny, and often surprising story about the unique connection between sisters. Michael will be in conversation with Laura Furman.
In Prairie Fever, Parker takes his readers to the prairie of Oklahoma in the early 1900s and introduces two sisters, opposites in every way, as they grow up amongst the rugged landscape.
“In the tradition of Katherine Ann Porter, Parker’s exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier.” —Publishers Weekly
“A frontier tale of sibling rivalry. . . Parker’s novel isn’t as much about sisterhood as love, as the two struggle to reckon with their estrangement head-on; some of the novel’s most powerful sections are Elise’s letters to Lorena, addressed not directly to sis but to the horse she rode during the blizzard. . .the easygoing, sometimes-smirking nature of the prose (True Grit comes to mind) makes the novel a pleasant ride overall.” —Kirkus Reviews
Michael Parker’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He is the Nicholas and Nancy Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and divides his time between Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas.
Laura Furman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Bennington College. After college she worked at Grove Press and then as a freelance copy editor for various New York publishing houses and the Menil Foundation. Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976, and since then work has appeared in Yale Review, Epoch, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, American Scholar, and other magazines. Her books include three collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir. Her most recent collection is The Mother Who Stayed. She has received fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, Dobie Paisano Project, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 2002, she’s been Series Editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories. For many years, she taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is now professor emerita. Laura Furman lives in Austin with her husband Joel Warren Barna and their son.
Join us in celebrating the Austin launch of Matty Layne Glasgow’s debut poetry collection deciduous qween (Red Hen Press). With readings from Matty, as well as Esteban Rodriguez, Laura Villarreal, and Alfredo Aguilar.
Matty Layne Glasgow’s debut collection deciduous qween is the winner of the 2017 Benjamin Saltman Award with Red Hen Press. Selected by President Obama’s inaugural poet Richard Blanco, deciduous qween explores the queer world all around us through the creaking of bedazzled branches and the soft rustle of jeweled leaves, revealing how we, like our environment, wear and shed identities in our performance as human, as drag queen, as ancient tree.
Matty Layne Glasgow’s debut collection, deciduous qween (Red Hen Press, 2019), was selected by Richard Blanco for the Benjamin Saltman Award. His poems appear in the Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Poetry Daily, Houston Public Media, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston, Texas and teaches with Writers in the Schools.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019) and the micro-chapbook Soledad (Ghost City Press, 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His reviews have appeared in PANK and American Book Review. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.
Laura Villareal earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. She is a recipient of the 2018 Key West Literary Seminar Teacher and Librarian Scholarship, The Highlights Foundation’s 2018 Laurie Halse Anderson Scholarship and Poetry at Round Top’s 2019 Norma Pascusz Fellowship. Her first chapbook The Cartography of Sleep came out in 2018 with Nostrovia! Press. Her writing can be found in Black Warrior Review, Vinyl, Waxwing, and elsewhere.
Alfredo Aguilar is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is a winner of the 92Y’s Discovery Contest and author of the chapbook What Happens On Earth (BOAAT Press 2018). He has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Best New Poets 2017, The Adroit Journal and elsewhere. Originally from North County San Diego, he now resides in Texas.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Murder on the Third Try, the third installment in K.P. Gresham’s Pastor Matt Hayden mystery series.
Former undercover cop Mike Hogan wakes up in an Austin, Texas, hospital ICU. Not only is he missing part of his skull, he is missing four years of memories. In those four years he learns he has entered the Fed’s Witness Protection Program and become a pastor, taken a church in rural Texas, and fallen in love with the beguiling, red-headed owner of the town’s local bar.
He does remember why he’s on the run. Howard Rutledge, former Chief of Police in Miami, has killed Mike’s father and brother, and wants Mike dead too. Mike’s testimony could put Rutledge in jail for racketeering, smuggling, and murder. When Mike wakes up in that ICU, he can only assume that Rutledge has found him.
Mike is helpless with a broken body and an unsettled mind. Who are his friends and who are his foes? Can he trust the kindly sheriff who has hired security to guard him? Can he trust the woman whom his soul remembers but his brain does not? Who in this unfamiliar world is his assassin? Mike Hogan must stay alive to put Rutledge away, and the hole in his head and his piecemeal memory are not going to stop him.
K.P. Gresham, author of the Pastor Matt Hayden mystery series and Three Days at Wrigley Field, moved to Texas as quick as she could. Born Chicagoan, K.P. and her husband moved to Texas, fell in love with not shoveling snow and are 30+ year Lone Star State residents. She finds that her dual country citizenship, the Midwest and Texas, provide deep fodder for her award-winning novels. Her varied careers as a media librarian and technical director, middle school literature teacher and theatre playwright and director add humor and truth to her stories. A graduate of Houston’s Rice University Novels Writing Colloquium, K.P. now resides in Austin, Texas, where life with her tolerant but supportive husband and narcissistic Chihuahua is acceptably weird.
We’ll be open from 10am – 5pm on July 4th. We’ll be eating cake and reading from The Constitution every hour—and we’re also offering 25% off all non-fiction from our “Other” section.
Join us for a homecoming reading from Austinite Dr. Walter Moore. His book of poetry, My Lungs Are a Dive Bar, a series of deadpan/gritty/neo-beat/punkish poems about rural Indiana and urban Washington (some Texas, too) was published by EMP Books in the Spring of 2019. Walter will be joined by Owen Egerton.
“Hilarious, painful, and outrageous—often in the same phrase. Drawing from overheard fist fights, willfully eschewed observations, and half-a-lifetime of wrong turns turned right, Walter Moore crafts nail-sharp poems and prose explosions with a kind of screaming, laughing brilliance that is not be missed. These pages will slap your eyes until everything you see shines.” —Owen Egerton
Dr. Walter Moore or “Walt” was born in Singapore and has lived in about twenty cities/towns around the world: from Jakarta, Indonesia; Houston and Austin, Texas; Oklahoma City; Brooklyn, New York, and Carmel, California, to Providence, Rhode Island; Seattle, Washington, and Perth, Australia, among other places. In a former life, he worked as a life guard, line cook, restaurant server, law clerk, and tennis teaching professional. More recently, he’s written reading passages for an education textbook company, worked as a journalist for a few newspapers, and published poems in various journals. His scholarly research interests include 20th-Century American Literature and Film and, specifically, how selected literary and cinematic texts “speak to” the narratives of gentrification in U.S. cities. Walt is also currently working on a novel about a drifter who returns to his hometown of Houston, Texas. Dr. Moore has taught courses in academic writing, creative writing, literature, and film in places as varied as Southwestern University, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Washington Tacoma. 2018-2019 marks his second year of teaching at Oregon State University and his fifteenth year of teaching at the college level overall. He holds a BA in English from DePauw University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University, and a Ph.D. in American Studies (English) from Purdue University. His other joys include playing soccer and tennis, watching movies, seeing live music, and hanging out in the Pacific Northwest with his partner Erica and his 100-pound dog/beast Lloyd.
Owen Egerton, original Austin polymath, is one of the founders of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Master Pancake Theatre, has acted in several films, emcees the Fantastic Debates at the Fantastic Fest, and hosts public radio’s The Write Up. He’s written four books of fiction (the novel Hollow being the most recent) and directed three films. Mercy Black, his most recent film, was just released by Netflix.
Join us in celebrating the launch of the 2019 summer 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.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Donna Dechen Birdwell’s new novel, Not Knowing, on July 20th, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon walk—an event that is of some significance in this book!
Donna Dechen Birdwell is an anthropologist whose latest novel takes place in two locales she knows and loves—Belize and Texas. Stepping away from the dystopian future she created in Recall Chronicles, she writes in Not Knowing about two wings of our human quest for knowledge—archaeology and space exploration.
Join us in celebrating the launch of C. S. Woolwine’s debut novel, Cyclic.
Cyclic is a new take on the integration of man and machine. Imagine being able to think of anything you desire, and instantly spawn it into existence. Imagine the good that could come from this, the wonder and excitement, the freedom of creation. Nothing is off limits! Now, imagine the bad. The purpose of this tale is to open your mind to the possibility, to explore what could be. This epic adventure is set in the distant future when society has already deemed this technology worthy. The story follows Cal, whose mediocre life can be best described as wanting. He’s thrown into a world he never knew existed when he discovers certain traits which make him particularly skilled with this technology. He must rebuild himself after tragedy, learn to master cyclic, and fight for what he believes in… even when it’s only him who believes it.
C. S. Woolwine, also known as “HaxDogma,” was born in the little border town of Yuma, Arizona. Growing up he lived in Pasadena, Maryland where he found his passion for technology. After high school, he decided to pursue cyber security and found his calling for Information Technology. Right after college, he moved down to Austin, TX with his girlfriend, now wife, and started climbing the corporate ladder. His quick rise in the IT field, and his YouTube channel dedicated to analytical discussion, gave him the confidence to continue pursuing a dream he’s had since he was a boy, writing. Inspired to create a better world for his wife and furry children, Mr. Woolwine finished the story he has been trying to tell his entire life… Cyclic.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Ron Seybold’s Stealing Home, a memoir about fatherhood, baseball, and an epic road trip with a Little Leaguer.
An epic road trip with my tween set me on a path to uncover perfection in fatherhood—and how my father’s suicide didn’t doom me to recreate his mistakes. Stealing Home is the story of an 11-day, 9-game road trip I took with my Little Leaguer—and how my plans for perfection delivered things much deeper than scores, miles, and smiles. You don’t have to drive 3,147 miles to find your way to fatherhood. When I did, something magical and rare appeared at the end of the journey, inside my heart as well as on a diamond. As a divorced dad, I was trying to redeem my fatherhood with a baseball road trip with my Little League son Nicky. Our odyssey of nine games in eleven days, crossing eight states in a rented convertible, was supposed to salvage my life as an unsure father. Custody Dad fatherhood demoted me to the second team. I was certain of that. One sign of salvation came unbidden in an unscheduled tenth ballgame. The adventures and revelations of the road led to a deeper reckoning of how my father had failed enough at his fatherhood to take his own life. Thousands of miles and dozens of innings delivered a discovery: a drive toward perfect fatherhood has a destination that cannot be found on any map.
Ron Seybold directs the Writer’s Workshop in Austin, a place for workshopping, books and weekly creativity groups. His debut novel is Viral Times, futuristic thriller about a pandemic that changes the way the world heals and loves. A two-time finalist in the Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contests for memoir and historical fiction, he’s reported over the radio, acted in Austin melodramas, and walks his standard poodle Tess Harding less often than she’d like. A teaching volunteer at the Austin Bat Cave literacy program in schools, he coaches writers, edits books, and plays a part in helping authors from inspiration to publication.
Join us for a reading and exhibit to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
The keynote poet is Alex Lemon, author of Another Last Day (Milkweed Editions, 2019). Saúl Hernández will be an additional poetry reader. The featured artist for this issue is James Surls, who contributed his artwork to the cover of Borderlands‘ Issue #1 in 1992! An engaging visual series by Surls is showcased in Issue 50 and several pieces will be presented at Malvern Books by Ruby Surls, James’ daughter. Frances Thompson from the UMLAUF Sculpture Garden & Museum will discuss Surls’s current exhibit there. Liz Garton Scanlon, early Borderlands editor, will provide remarks on the history of the journal. Terry Sherrell, account liaison for Borderlands since the premier issue, will discuss her experiences designing and printing the journal.
Bring friends – join the celebration! The event is free of charge and open to everyone. Copies will be available for purchase on-site.
Keynote poet Alex Lemon’s Another Last Day was just published by Milkweed Editions. He is the author of two memoirs—Feverland: A Memoir in Shards and Happy: A Memoir—and four poetry collections: The Wish Book, Fancy Beasts, Hallelujah Blackout and Mosquito. His writing has appeared in Borderlands, Esquire, American Poetry Review, The Huffington Post, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, AGNI, New England Review, The Southern Review, Grist, and jubilat, among numerous other publications. Among his awards are a 2005 Fellowship in Poetry from the NEA, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is an editor at large for Saturnalia Books, the Poetry Editor of descant and he sits on the advisory board of The Southern Review and TCU Press. He lives in Fort Worth with his amazing family and teaches at TCU.
Saúl Hernández is a queer writer from San Antonio, TX. He was raised by undocumented parents and as a Jehovah Witness. He has a MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. He’s the former Director for Barrio Writers at Borderlands. He’s a semi-finalists for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, Nimrod Literary Journal. His work has appeared/is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Normal School, and Rio Grande Review.
Borderlands is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
Join us for an evening with translator Sam Bett, who will be introducing and reading from his new book, a translation of Yukio Mishima’s novel Star. Sam will be joined by a number of poets, including Sarah Matthis, Rainey Frasier, Taylor Davis, Dion K. James, and Stephanie Davison, who will read poems that address the novel’s themes of celebrity, the camera, and “being seen.”
All eyes are on Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the director sets up the shot, the camera begins to roll, someone yells “action”; Rikio, for a moment, transforms into another being, a hardened young yakuza, but as soon as the shot is finished, he slumps back into his own anxieties and obsessions. Being a star, constantly performing, being watched and scrutinized as if under a microscope, is often a drag. But so is life. Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film Afraid to Die, this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams. With exquisite, vivid prose, Star begs the question: is there any escape from how we are seen by others?
SAM BETT studied Japanese at UMass-Amherst and Kwansei Gakuin University. Awarded Grand Prize in the 2016 JLPP International Translation Competition, he has translated fiction by Yoko Ogawa, Yukio Mishima, and NISIOISIN. With David Boyd, he is co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami for Europa Editions.
Join us in celebrating the recent release of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s David Mogo, Godhunter, a powerful and atmospheric urban fantasy novel set in Lagos. Suyi will be joined by Austin writer Jack Kaulfus.
The gods have fallen to earth in their thousands, and chaos reigns. Though broken and leaderless, the city endures. David Mogo, demigod and godhunter, has one task: capture two of the most powerful gods in the city and deliver them to the wizard gangster Lukmon Ajala. No problem, right?
Suyi Davies Okungbowa is a Nigerian SFF author of the recent godpunk novel, David Mogo, Godhunter. His shorter works have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com., Strange Horizons, Fireside, and other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria and Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches undergraduate creative writing while completing his MFA.
Join us in celebrating the launch of John Casey’s RAW THΦUGHTS, a visceral, mindful, and compelling fusion of poetics and black and white film photography. John will be joined by Jack Bresette-Mills, author of the bilingual poetry collection Touching Death / Tocando la Muerte (with artwork by Jennifer Klimsza).
In RAW THΦUGHTS, John Casey unfolds a compelling and viscerally honest exploration of mindfulness and spirituality through a symbiotic fusion of poetic and photographic art. A singular and provocative approach, Casey combines literary and visual abstraction into emotive and cognitive catalysts for introspection. Each successive poem-photo pairing—each ‘raw thought’—builds on an underlying philosophy that compels us to assess and adjust what and how we think, with the aim of improving our lives—and by extension, the lives of those around us.
Jack Bresette-Mills, the author of Reasoning with an Optimist and Sensitive Beekeeping, lives happily with his dear wife, Barbara, in Austin, Texas.
Join us in celebrating Women in Translation Month, with readings and discussion from award-winning poet and acclaimed Spanish translator Liliana Valenzuela, and Marian Schwartz, who translates Russian classic and contemporary fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. Liliana will read from Puro Amor by Sandra Cisneros, and Marian will read from The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being by Olga Slavnikova.
Also worth noting: On the day of this event, we’re offering 25% off all books in translation that are written or translated by women.
Liliana Valenzuela is the acclaimed Spanish language translator of works by Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, and many other writers. As a poet, she is the author of Codex of Journeys: Bendito Camino and is an inaugural fellow of CantoMundo. An adopted tejana, Valenzuela was born and raised in Mexico City and now lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Marian Schwartz has translated many books of Russian contemporary and classic fiction, including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and is the principal translator of Nina Berberova. In 2018, Archipelago Books published her translation of Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands.
Join us in celebrating the upcoming launch of visiting poet Sarah Herrin’s chapbook, The Oceanography of Her (Papeachu Press). Sarah will be joined by Christia Madacsi Hoffman.
Sarah Herrin is a poet based in Seattle, Washington. Raised in the Deep South, she escaped to the Pacific Northwest in 2012. She achieved a BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she studied Sequential Art and Creative Writing. Her work is inspired by world travel, her bisexual identity, mental health, heartbreak and healing, the ocean, and above all—love. She is a gemologist, runner/triathlete, cat mom, wife, and Bowie lover. Sarah is the author of One Thousand Questions (And No Good Answers) and the chapbook The Oceanography of Her, to be released October 2019.
Christia Madacsi Hoffman grew up along the banks of the Mystic River in Mystic, Connecticut. Through her Austin-based company, CenterLight Media, Hoffman works as a marketing and editorial writer, graphic designer, and actor. Her early career adventures included antique furniture restoration and leading treks in the high Himalaya. With an accessible and insightful poetic voice, Hoffman’s poetry explores the universal themes of place, beauty, youth, and family. Her personal reflections reveal the depth in our everyday experiences and the significance of our intentions.
Join us for a reading from final year students in The Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers Project M.F.A. programs in creative writing at UT Austin. Readers include Shaina Frazier, Loan Tran, Darby Jardeleza, Max Seifert, and Desiree Evans (left to right, below).
Shaina Frazier was born in Sacramento, CA but was raised in H-Town. She earned her BFA from the University of Houston in 2015 and is currently a fiction MFA candidate in the New Writers Project at UT Austin. She is currently writing about race and talking nooses and magic and martyrdom.
Loan Tran lives in Austin, TX and likes to browse around bookstores and the produce section of supermarkets. She is in the New Writers Project and writes poems.
Darby Jardeleza is currently in her second year at the New Writers Project. She is from Bluffton, South Carolina, though she most recently moved to Austin from Atlanta, Georgia. She is at work on her first novel thanks to the help and support of the NWP and Michener community.
Max Seifert writes poetry. You can find it in The Adroit Journal, b[OINK] Zine, Gulf Coast, and Tupelo Quarterly. He lives over by Eastwoods Neighborhood Park.
Desiree Evans is a writer, activist, and scholar hailing from south Louisiana. She is currently an MFA Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin. Her writing has received fellowships and support from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation.
Join us in celebrating the collection America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience. With co-editor Murray Silverstein, as well as Miriam Bird Greenberg, Jesús I. Valles, and Abe Louise Young.
Soon after the 2016 presidential election, Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared-work collective of Northern California poets, conducted a nationally advertised call for submissions, seeking unpublished poems that would “respond to the cultural, moral, and political rifts that now divide our country: poems of resistance and resilience, witness and vision, that embody what it means to be a citizen in a time when our democracy is threatened.” In a matter of weeks, the press received over two thousand poems. The work came from across the country, from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns. At the same time, the poet-members of the press were asked to nominate poems. These poems could be old or new, published or not, the poets living or dead—anything from anywhere that spoke to this moment in the voice of poetry. In this way, the editors gathered another three hundred poems, ranging from Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Bai Juyi to last Thursday’s just-posted Poem-a-Day. America, We Call Your Name is a blend of poems from these two sources, each of its nine sections a kind of town-hall meeting where citizen-poets gather to raise their voices, now raucous, now muted, now lyric, now plain: voices responding with dissent and consoling with praise, perspective, vision, and hope.
Murray Silverstein is Sr. Editor of America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (2010), both from Sixteen Rivers Press. He is the author of two books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007). Any Old Wolf received the 2007 Independent Publisher medal for poetry. He is a retired architect and co-author of four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press). His poems have appeared in RATTLE, Brooklyn Review, Spillway, California Quarterly, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, Zyzzyva, Fourteen Hills, Pembroke Magazine, Elysian Fields, and other journals. Silverstein lives in Oakland, California.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Esteban Rodríguez’s debut poetry collection, Dusk & Dust, which explores the lives of the generations who have made their homes along the US-Mexico border, in a landscape too often neglected and forgotten. Rodríguez will be joined by Leanna Petronella, Saul Hernandez, and Gabino Iglesias.
In Dust & Dusk by Esteban Rodríguez, the ordinary and the astounding enrich and enlarge each other. These poems shimmer with surprising phrasing and dazzling figurative language. We encounter ‘pews of dirt’ and the month of June becomes a ‘fugitive outrunning spring’s custody.’ There’s emotional range, too. Sorrow and wonder, and all their synonyms, darken and illuminate the poems. Rodríguez is a gifted poet who has written an impressive and memorable book. —Eduardo Corral, author of Slow Lightning
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press) and the micro-chapbook Soledad (Ghost City Press, 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His reviews have appeared in PANK and American Book Review. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.
Leanna Petronella’s debut collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, Quarterly West, and other publications. She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. She lives in Austin.
Saúl Hernández is a queer writer from San Antonio, TX. He was raised by undocumented parents and as a Jehovah Witness. He has a MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. He’s the former Director for Barrio Writers at Borderlands. He’s a semi-finalists for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, Nimrod Literary Journal. His work has appeared/is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Normal School, and Rio Grande Review.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book critic living in Austin. He is the author of Coyote Songs and Zero Saints. His words have appeared in venues like the New York Times, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Times, and others. He is the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine and a columnist for LitReactor and CLASH Media.
Join us in celebrating the release of L.B. Deyo’s The God-Damned Fool. the second publication of Austin-based publishing company Persistence of Vision.
Join author Amber Elby to celebrate the release of her third novel, Trouble Fires Burn, a fantasy adventure based on the plays of William Shakespeare. Amber and special guest author Carol Beth Anderson will read excerpts from their novels and answer audience questions. Signed books available for purchase. Family friendly. All ages welcome!
Amber Elby crafts a world that invokes the best of Terry Pratchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Neil Gaiman, all rooted in the mythology of Shakespeare. The Netherfeld series is a must read for lovers of magic, the inexplicable, and especially the timeless wonder conjured by the plays of William Shakespeare.
—Montgomery Sutton, Shakespearean Actor, Director, and Playwright
Amber Elby is the author of three novels based on Shakespeare’s plays: Cauldron’s Bubble, Double Double Toil, and Trouble Fires Burn. In the last millennium, she was born in Grand Ledge, Michigan but spent much of her childhood in the United Kingdom. She began writing when she was three years old and created miniature books by asking her family how to spell every… single… word. Several years later, she saw her first Shakespearean comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, in London. Many years later, she studied Creative Writing at Michigan State University’s Honors College before earning her Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin. She enjoys watching Shakespearean performances with her husband and two daughters and divides her time between teaching at Austin Community College, traveling, and getting lost in imaginary worlds.
Carol Beth Anderson is a native of Arizona and now lives in Leander, TX. She has a husband, two kids, a miniature schnauzer, and more fish than anyone knows what to do with. Besides writing, she loves baking sourdough bread, knitting, and eating cookies-and-cream ice cream.
Join us in celebrating International Translation Day. Jennifer Rose Davis will discuss her new translation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac (which she is currently directing for a limited Austin run as a co-production between The Archive Theater and The Austin Scottish Rite Theater). Also featuring the presentation of the award of the Harvie Jordan fedora to AATIA Member of the Year. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF all books in translation all day on Sunday, September 29th!
Jennifer Rose Davis is a writer, director, actress, singer, musician, costumer, mask maker, artist, graphic designer, and all-around Renaissance woman who serves as the Managing Director for The Archive Theater. Her theatrical credits include Music Director, Costumer, and Set Designer for Der Bestrafte Brudermord with The Hidden Room. She was also Associate Costumer The Hidden Room’s The History of King Lear by Nahum Tate, for which she won an Austin Critic’s Table award. Jennifer designed costumes and danced Butoh for Still Now with Shrewd Productions. She created Tudor era costumes for Austin Shakespeare’s staged readings of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Hillary Mantle’s Wolf Hall, and Elizabethan costumes for The Merry Wives of Windsor co-produced by Austin Scottish Rite Theater and Weird Sisters. Her latest consuming project was creating costumes for the Zilker Summer Musical, The Little Mermaid.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Stephanie Goehring’s chapbook, from The Water [Inaudible] (Host Publications)—and Malvern’s sixth birthday!
Host Publications is honored to award Stephanie Goehring’s chapbook from The Water [Inaudible] as the recipient of the Fall 2019 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.
Stephanie Goehring is the author of several poetry chapbooks. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and works at Malvern Books in Austin, TX.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of Alisar Eido’s new novel, Wake of War. With readings from Alisar, and special guests Brennan Utley and Kendall Smith.
Alisar Eido’s third novel, Wake of War, is the final book of The Soulfire Series. Her work spans multiple genres including science fiction, psychological thrillers, dark fantasy, and realistic fiction. The author’s inspiration stems from her many experiences with strange coincidences and unexplainable events, as well as battles with mental illness. She currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her pens and pencils.
Brennan Utley is an emerging author based in Austin who blends realist, fabulist, science fiction, and satirical traditions into his unique and often darkly funny stories and novels. He is currently working late into the night on a handful of projects and teaches English in Bastrop, Texas.
Kendall Smith is a budding author born and raised in Austin, Texas. In the past, she’s been a ballerina, self-proclaimed chef, an avid gamer and an amateur podcast host. As a writer, she focuses on immersing her audience in realms where diverse experience leads to profound conflicts, the weak are stronger than they seem, the scenery is opulently feral, and fantasies are limitless.
Join us in celebrating the launch of poet Logan Fry’s new collection, Harpo Before the Opus. Logan will be joined by poet Caroline Gormley.
The poems begin where language fails, where speech becomes disembodied, and syntax skids to a stop that dissolves into gesture. Where its form reaches an end, formlessness offers a space ripe with possibility. Here we find Harpo, reaching into the frustrated endpoint of language to find a method for its resurrection. Fry sees that language becomes a tool for alienation and uses the poems in Harpo Before the Opus to excavate paths back to tenderness. These are poems from the edge, pulling language out from its failure and into a fervent interrogation of its possibilities. What was once a tool of capitalistic alienation now serves as material for building connections.
In spiraling explorations of rhetoric, these poems allow language to break from its prescribed structures, and instead, it becomes a gestural embrace of feeling and being. Fry utilizes a Marxist lens to scrutinize and reinvent the use of language. In Fry’s hands, language is rendered a visceral and sensual material, forming poems that are both deeply felt philosophical inquiries and wildly playful exercises of wit.
Logan Fry is the author of Harpo Before the Opus—selected by Srikanth Reddy as winner of Omnidawn’s 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize. He is founding editor of Flag + Void, and his poetry has appeared in venues including Fence, Prelude, New American Writing, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, and the Best American Experimental Writing anthology. He lives in Austin and teaches at Texas State University.
Caroline Gormley is an editor of Flag + Void. She attended Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College and currently works for an in-house creative agency. She has come out of poetry retirement for this very special reading with her husband, Logan.
Join us in celebrating the recent release of Vincent Cooper’s poetry collection Zarzamora. Vincent will be joined by Claudia Delfina Cardona and Laura Villareal.
Vincent Cooper is Chicano poet from Los Angeles, Ca. He is the author of Where the Reckless Ones Come to Die and Zarzamora—Poetry of Survival. His poetry can be found in Big Bridge Magazine, Huizache #6 and 8, AMP, Voices De La Luna, The Acentos Review, Riversedge Journal and Abstract Magazine. He currently resides in the westside of San Antonio.
Claudia Delfina Cardona is a tejana poet proudly born and raised in San Antonio. She received her MFA in Poetry at Texas State University this past spring. She is also the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of Chifladazine, an online and print publication that is dedicated to showcasing the creative work of Latinas and Latinxs. Her work can be found in Cosmonauts Avenue, Tinderbox Journal, and Apogee Journal.
Laura Villareal earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of The Cartography of Sleep. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from Key West Literary Seminar and The Highlights Foundation.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Christopher Carmona’s new novel El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande. With readings from Christopher and his brother, author Juan P. Carmona.
El Rinche is a reimagining and flip of the script of an American popular culture icon. This novel tells the story a light-skinned Mexican American named Ascencion “Chonnie” Ruiz de Plata. He disguises himself as the ghost of a Texas Ranger on the South Texas border of Mexico now known as The Rio Grande Valley between 1905-1921. Together with his partner, the Native American Tal’dos, a Japanese ninja master, and the most successful U.S. Marshall of all time, Bass Reeves (the real lone ranger), Chonnie takes on the superhero persona of “El Rinche” to fight the villainous Texas Rangers and save the local peoples of the area.
Christopher Carmona is the author of The Road to Llorona Park, which won the 2016 NACCS Tejas Best Fiction Award and was listed as one of the top 8 Latinx books in 2016 by NBCNews. He was the inaugural writer-in-residence for the Langdon Review Writers Residency Program in 2015. He has three books of poetry: 140 Twitter Poems, I Have Always Been Here and beat. He co-edited The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings with Chuck Taylor and Rob Johnson and Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World with Rossy Evelin Lima. He has also co-written Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Poetics. Currently, he is working on 280: Poems from the Twitterverse and a series of YA novellas entitled El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande. The first book in this series is out now and is a 2019 Texas Institute of Letters Best Young Adult Book Finalist. He teaches at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Brownsville in Mexican American Studies and Creative Writing.
A September morning in 1989 changed the city of Alton’s history forever. At 7:34 a.m., a Dr. Pepper truck collided with Mission School Bus no. 6. After the bus and its occupants plunged into a water-filled caliche pit, 21 students lost their lives. Thirty years later, a new book reveals the impact of the Alton Bus Crash. The resulting aftermath was a small South Texas community flooded with reporters and lawyers. The heavily scrutinized legal battle divided the city, but it did ultimately produce changes in school bus safety that continue to save lives today. Juan P. Carmona navigates the complicated legacy of the tragic accident and its aftermath.
Juan P. Carmona is a Social Studies teacher at Donna High School and a Dual-Enrollment History Instructor through South Texas College. He graduated with honors from the American Military University with a Master’s degree in American History and was the recipient of the 2018 James F. Veninga Outstanding Teaching Humanities Award by Humanities Texas. His primary field of research is the history of South Texas borderlands.
Join us in celebrating the release of Jessica Reisman’s first short story collection, The Arcana of Maps.
The Arcana of Maps should be at the top of everyone’s must-read lists. Jessica Reisman’s unique lyrical voice powers some of the finest short fiction of this (and really any) century.”—Richard Klaw, editor of Rayguns Over Texas and The Apes of Wrath
This first collection of Jessica Reisman’s stories roves the liminal spaces between now and not-quite-now, dream and waking, futures far flung and fantastic. Here are tales of adventure and transformation, clockwork detectives and polar bears, a wild sea on a space station, alien salvage and revenants. Featuring 16 previously published works and one unique to the collection, these stories open obscure doors into fantastic otherwheres and whens, conjuring worlds with deft and evocative lyricism.
Jessica Reisman‘s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her far future science fiction adventure novel Substrate Phantoms came out from Resurrection House Books in 2017. She grew up on the east coast of the U.S., was a teenager on the west coast, and now lives in Austin, Texas. She’s been a writer, animal lover, reader, and movie aficionado since she was a wee child.
Join us in celebrating the recent launch of John Domini’s fourth novel, The Color Inside a Melon. With readings from John and special guest Lowell Mick White.
The Color Inside a Melon appeared this summer. Blurbs came from Salman Rushdie and Marlon James, and the Washington Post praised the book as “sage” and spry,” The Millions as “stunning” and “poetic.” Set in Naples, Italy, the novel completes a loose trilogy. Domini also has three books of stories, the latest MOVIEOLA!, which The Millions called “a new shriek for a new century.” His criticism has appeared in the New York Times and elsewhere, and is collected in The Sea-God’s Herb. His awards include an NEA Fellowship and an Iowa Major Artist Grant.
Lowell Mick White is the author of six books: novels Normal School and Professed and Burnt 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.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Esteban Rodríguez‘s new poetry collection, Crash Course. With readings from Esteban and special guest ire’ne lara silva.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for PANK and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.
ire’ne lara silva is the author of three poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), and CUICACALLI/House of Song (Saddle Road Press, 2019), an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013) which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire’ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Roberto Ontiveros’ debut story collection, The Fight for Space.
In his debut collection, The Fight for Space, Roberto Ontiveros explores the modes of art and obsession with eleven stories that run from fabulist comedy to surrealist noir. The tales—focusing on the inner lives of adult caregivers, delivery drivers, and painters—trace how the ubiquity of media (the world of sitcoms, talk radio, and superhero comics) comes to flood the working class with a dream-like dread. In this book, a budding con artist tries to sell a house that does not belong to her, an anti-social memoirist pens the fates of his friends, and a comic book-obsessed warehouse employee follows a man who wears a gas mask. Atmospheric and erotic, the stories in The Fight for Space recall the literary mysteries of James M. Cain by way of Twin Peaks.
Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, literary critic and journalist. Some of his work has appeared the Threepenny Review, the Santa Monica Review, the Believer Magazine, and Huizache. He is working on a novel and a collection of interlinking stories. He is the proud father of Maximo Spinoza Ontiveros.
The Rio Review Release party is a fun-filled gathering where students, writers, and creative minds alike come together to celebrate the publication of the newest anthology of ACC’s Student Literary and Arts Journal, The Rio Review!
The Rio Review is a student-run journal that showcases a collection of poetry, prose, and artwork submitted and published by talented ACC students every Fall and Spring semester.
This soirée is not only a party to celebrate the newest edition of The Rio Review, but it is also a perfect opportunity to meet and network with other writers and artists in the area while enjoying refreshments, artwork, and student readings!
Join us for a celebration hosted by Pterodáctilo, the bilingual journal and blog run by graduate students in UT Austin’s department of Spanish and Portuguese. This bilingual event will feature poetry readings… and tamales!
Featured poets include Sarah Webb, Tony Kotecki, Katherine Durham-Oldmixon, Cindy Huyser, Christa Pandey, Frank Pool, Charles Darnell, Claire Vogel-Camargo, Terry Dawson, and Chip Dameron.
Join us for a poetry reading to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler. With M.C. Sylvia Manning.
Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was born in Laredo, Texas, but he lived in Austin in his later years, and became a local literary legend. You could usually find him in a café in Hyde Park, decked out in suspenders, smoking, drinking coffee, and working on a poem. (Rumor has it he wrote a poem a day, and his impressive publication record—four full-length collections, plus hundreds of poems published in chapbooks and journals—lends veracity to the story.) He was a two-time winner of the Austin Book Awards, and in 1989 the state legislature formally honored him for his contribution to Texas poetry. In May 2013 a new Hyde Park green space at the corner of 38th and Duval Streets was named Huffstickler Green in his honor. Huff was a friend and inspiration to many, and everyone who knew him talks of his kindness, his honesty, and his passionate support for local literature. Austin Community College English professor W. Joe Hoppe describes his friend and mentor as “a great encourager of poetry.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 Deluge, The Spectacle, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives in Amherst, MA.
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 History, A 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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.
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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Join the celebration as poets from across Texas read about the diverse culture, iconography, and geography of our home state. Come share the holiday spirit via Zoom!
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Join us 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 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.
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.
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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.
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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, Professed, Burnt 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.
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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.
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.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89765504015?pwd=dkNMUkpGNDUxQ2lMaWM3b043cXNUUT09
Meeting ID: 897 6550 4015
Passcode: 033640
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.
Join us via Zoom for a reading with Awst Press, featuring authors Donald Quist, Andrew Yoon, and Esteban Rodríguez.
Donald Quist will be reading from a new book of essays, To Those Bounded. Andrew Yoon’s poetry collection We Are Invited to Climb, part of Awst’s “pocket book” collection, came out in September. And local author Esteban Rodriguez recently published a debut essay collection called Before the Earth Devours Us.
Donald Quist is author of Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner and International Book Awards Finalist. He has a linked story collection, For Other Ghosts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and was Notable in Best American Essays 2018. He is creator of the online nonfiction series PAST TEN. Donald has received fellowships from Sundress Academy for the Arts, Kimbilio Fiction, and served as a Gus T. Ridgel fellow for the English PhD program at University of Missouri. He is Director of the MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Andrew Yoon is a New York-based Korean-American artist involved in music, poetry, and computers. Lately he is writing poems that change, making music with paint and dance, live-coding sounds, and leading the Melodica Drone and Bach Orchestra. He is the founder of the arts journal and small press Nothing to Say. As a free culture advocate everything he makes is under copyleft licenses, including this collection.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.
Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 822 8835 4224
Passcode: 186776
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Leticia Urieta’s Las Criaturas. With readings from Leticia Urieta and Sueitko Zamorano-Chavez.
Las Criaturas is a hybrid collection that blends poetic and speculative narrative forms to tell stories of untold women. The poems and short stories play with traditional storytelling forms and tales to ruminate on the monstrous, unruly, vulnerable, strength and beauty in the feminine and seek to reclaim people’s power in powerless situations. The book is broken into three sections to show the multifaceted nature of the word “criatura.” In the story, “The Monster” a child in a migrant detention center is haunted by a monster made of her own fear. In “La Mujer Alacran,” a woman who is sexually assaulted transforms into a literal “scorpion woman” in order to protect herself. In “The Inbetween Mother,” a daughter attempts to reunite her selkie mother with her true form.
Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a teaching artist in the greater Austin community and a freelance writer. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, Lumina, The Offing, Kweli Journal, Medium, Electric Lit and others. Her chapbook, The Monster, is out now from LibroMobile Press and her hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.
Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83908808756?pwd=bTcwVkRNSjBGZFhjeXJHMndZNlpsQT09
For over twenty years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Texas’ most iconic poets. Join the celebration as poets from across Texas read about the diverse culture, iconography, and geography of our home state. Come share the holiday spirit via Zoom!
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Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of two poetry collections from John Sibley Williams: The Drowning House, winner of The Elixir Press Poetry Award, and Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, winner of The Cider Press Review Book Award. With guests Chloe Martinez and Esteban Rodriguez.
“In The Drowning House, John Sibley Williams grapples with ghosts, the predators outside and in, those closer than our own hearts. In American landscapes haunted by nooses and wolves, burning crosses and floods, Williams holds a light before his path. These are keen-edged poems, kneeling before us, asking forgiveness for what our ancestors have done and have had to live through. He offers himself as a sacrifice for our sins: ‘here, love, is the tree of my body // to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch / whatever’s still up there, beautifully above us.'” —Philip Metres
“With an impressive mastery of sound matched only by his alchemical imagery, Williams guides readers along mythic highways, above oceans, and towards the reimagining of a bridge no one remembers. To conjure is a recurring theme in this impressive collection—as if language holds the power to reconfigure a past, a mother, a child. And perhaps it can. Williams’ words are that convincing. Recasting home as conch shell, as ghost house, and as fire, we learn that we are held together by the tensile strength of our own narrative. I’ve circled and underlined lines on nearly every poem in Scale Model of a Country at Dawn. This is a book you’ll want to read, and then turn to the first poem to enter again. Even if no one is safe from the wolves in our hearts, John Sibley Williams helps us live within these contradictions.” —Susan Rich
John Sibley Williams is the author of four award-winning poetry collections: The Drowning House, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, As One Fire Consumes Another, and Skin Memory. A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of Caesura Poetry Workshop.
Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Common, Shenandoah and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Valley (Sundress Publications 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in central Texas.
Zoom Information:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87675014021?pwd=UUY0aVA0MFU5T2dkdVRDMlFtYVBPQT09
Meeting ID: 876 7501 4021
Passcode: 817232
Join us in celebrating Kallisto Gaia Press’ joint release of two new chapbooks: How to Identify Yourself with a Wound by Austin poet KB, winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize; and a new collection, Motherboard, from a Saguaro Poetry Prize finalist, Vermont poet Renee Rossi.
“The poems in How to Identify Yourself with a Wound pull no punches. Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize
KB is a Black queer nonbinary miracle. They are the author of HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) and Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023). KB is a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow and has words published in Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere.
“Motherboard possesses a compelling voice that moves you from awe at the abundant beauty of the natural world and transcendent life moments to a strange fear of how vulnerable our happinesses are, how changeable the world is. And yet, the poet’s voice is sure and strong, negotiating the changing terrain of our lives.” —ire’ne lara silva, judge, 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize
Renée Rossi has published the full-length poetry collection, TRIAGE, and two chapbooks: THIRD Worlds and STILL LIFE, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize. A native of Detroit, she currently divides her time between the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and other places that she finds compelling.
Zoom Information:
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the Austin launch of E.C. Belli’s second collection, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep (Anhinga Press), winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. With readings from E.C. Belli, Sam Ross, Safiya Sinclair, and Diana Khoi Nguyen.
“When Sappho was asked to define beauty, she answered ‘Some people say it’s a herd of black horses in the grass, some people say it’s a fleet of warships leaving the harbor. I say beauty is whatever you love.’ Reading E.C. Belli’s sensational A Sleep That is Not Our Sleep, I kept thinking of that bit of Sappho, thinking of Belli’s remarkable affinity for rendering with precision and acuity what is beloved, what is lovable, and what is unloved but worthy of it. One page reads, in its entirety, ‘little clavicle bone, you grew // things grow well in me.’ The verse odes the beauty of a bone, yes, but also the beauty of a self capable of growing and sustaining what it’s made. In this collection, stones whisper in the night, eyes mend into dials. The poem ‘Hues’ is worth the sticker price alone. To say it simply: Belli has written a singular collection, one I’ll be learning from for years.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell
E.C. Belli is a bilingual poet and translator. Her second book, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep, was selected by Cathy Park Hong to be winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry (Anhinga Press, 2022). Her debut collection of poems, Objects of Hunger, is winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019). Her translation of I, Little Asylum, a short novel by Emmanuelle Guattari, was released by Semiotext(e) for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and The Nothing Bird, her translation of some selected poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd, appeared with Oberlin College Press (2013). She is the recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and her work has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, AGNI, and FIELD. Work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE (France), among others. She is the author of the chapbook plein jeu.
Sam Ross is the author of Company, winner of the Four Way Book Levis Prize in Poetry and the 2020 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Tin House, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications, and he has received support from Columbia University School of the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is also a painter.
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK. Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Civitella Rainieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her memoir, How to Say Babylon, is forthcoming in 2023 from Simon & Schuster.
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. This spring 2022, she is an artist-in-residence at Brown University.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 829 3604 3761
Passcode: 703398
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Maria Wells’ Images in the Clouds: Reading the Sky.
“These poems have personal integrity and are both deeply felt and clearly voiced, always welcome in any art.” —Kurt Heinzelman, Professor Emeritus of Poetry and Poetics, The University of Texas at Austin
A combination of sixty poems and ten color illustrations, Images in the Clouds carries the reader forward and back in time, to inner and outer worlds. Taken from Wells’ treasure trunk of a life of adventure and world travel, some verses share memories of places and people, while some delight with pure fantasy and imagination.
A Fulbright Scholar and Doctoral graduate from the University of Pisa, Maria Xenia Wells Zevelechi spent her career at the University of Texas at Austin. After retiring from academia, she embraced poetry. Inspired by a friend’s painting, her first poem was “Memories in Silver,” written in Paris, at a meeting of Poets and Writers. A member of the Austin Poetry Society, she gives readings in Austin, Paris, and Greece. Her civic and cultural participation has included an active role in the Sierra Club, President of the Board of Director of Salon Concerts, member of the Fundraiser and Scholarship Committee for Zonta International Association of Business and Professional Women, and member of the Leadership Circle of Austin PBS. With two daughters, five grandchildren, and the memory of a loving husband, she lives in Austin, Texas.
Zoom Information:
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Meeting ID: 886 5800 6464
Passcode: 341837
Join us 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
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the release of Tomás Q. Morín’s new memoir, Let Me Count the Ways. Laura Marris, translator of the new edition of Camus’ The Plague—the first new translation of The Plague to be published in the United States in more than seventy years—will join as well.
Tomás Q. Morín is the author most recently of the poetry collection Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He is coeditor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, Slate, and Boston Review.
Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Yale Review, The Believer, The Point, and elsewhere. Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. With Alice Kaplan, she is the co-author of States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (forthcoming in fall 2022). She is currently at work on her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, which will be published by Graywolf in 2024.
Zoom Info:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89944125202?pwd=WWhGTUk2TGgwWWRjVndBYnBWRXNyZz09
Meeting ID: 899 4412 5202
Passcode: 587107
Join us via Zoom for a conversation between Fernando A. Flores, author of the recently released short story collection Valleyesque, and Edward Carey.
“These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores’s deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives.” —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Frédéric Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Juárez in the aftermath of his mother’s death, attempting to recover his beloved piano that was seized at the border, while a muralist is taken on a psychedelic journey by an airbrushed Emiliano Zapata T-shirt. A woman is engulfed by a used-clothing warehouse with a life of its own, and a grieving mother breathlessly chronicles the demise of a town decimated by violence. In two separate stories, queso dip and musical rhythms are bottled up and sold for mass consumption. And in the final tale, Flores pieces together the adventures of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as he starts a music career in Texas.
Swinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, Valleyesque is a boundary- and border-pushing collection from a one-of-a-kind stylist and voice. With the visceral imagination that made his debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, a cult classic, Flores brings his vision of the border to life—and beyond.
Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in Norfolk, England. He is the author of the novels Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva: the Twins Who Saved a City, and of the YA Iremonger Trilogy, which have all been translated into many different languages and all of which he illustrated. His novel Little has been published in 20 countries; his most recent novel is The Swallowed Man, which is set inside the belly of an enormous sea beast. He has taught creative writing and fairy tales on numerous occasions at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and at the Michener Center, and the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.
Zoom Information:
Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Laura Villareal’s new poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving. With guests Ana Portnoy Brimmer, T.K. Lê, and Alfredo Aguilar.
Tumbleweeds and wandering cacti litter the page, coyotes croon at the prose. In poems haunted by specters of intimate partner violence, Girl’s Guide to Leaving considers what it means to escape the love that trapped you and find a temporary home in the barely cooled ashes of a wildfire.
Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and the chapbook The Cartography of Sleep (Nostrovia!, 2018). She has received fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and National Book Critics Circle. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, AGNI, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Ana Portnoy Brimmer (pictured left) is a poet and organizer from Puerto Rico. She holds a BA and an MA from the University of Puerto Rico, and is an alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. To Love An Island, her debut poetry collection, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. She is currently working on the Spanish edition, forthcoming from La Impresora. Ana is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020, and was named one of Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets. She is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, resides in Puerto Rico and lives for dance parties and revolution.
T.K. Lê (she/her; pictured middle) is a multi-genre writer who grew up in Westminster, CA. She received her M.A. from UCLA in Asian American Studies, is an alum of the VONA Voices summer writing workshop, and was a 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, and in the W.W. Norton anthology, Inheriting the War. She serves as a board member for Viet Rainbow of Orange County, a grassroots organization that primarily works with LGBTQ+ Vietnamese Americans and their loved ones. She loves the outdoors and even more than that, she loves cats.
Alfredo Aguilar (pictured right) is the author of On This Side of the Desert, selected by Natalie Diaz for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What Happens On Earth. He is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North County San Diego, he currently resides in Central Texas where he is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.
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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.
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Meeting ID: 813 0413 9368
Passcode: 850781
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
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.