Malvern Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By day, Dr. Lacey Schmidt (bottom row, at left) is a “corporate” suit. She runs her own company, Minerva Work Solutions, and serves as the Executive Director for Faculty Development at the University of Houston. When she sheds her daytime persona, Lacey morphs into other roles: poet, artist, adventurer, and novelist. In the latter instance, she has published three lesfic romances with Affinity Rainbow Publications: A Walk Away, Catch to Release, and Playing With Matches. Lacey has also penned several short stories. Two romances, “Love’s Luck” and “Peaches and Honey” are in anthologies published by Affinity. Lacey’s latest short story is a sci-fi adventure entitled “A Lone Star.” It’s part of The Lone Star Collection, an anthology which benefits lesfic literary events. Lacey is married and lives in Houston. She and Laura have several furry children: Oberon, the tabby terrorist, and his sidekick, Sabina, plus two couch loving canines, Misha and Nakita.

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

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

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

Join us for a poetry reading with Joshua Edwards, Sarah Matthes, and Danielle Wheeler. Sponsored by the Poets & Scholars reading series from UT-Austin’s Poetry & Poetics Interest Group.

Joshua Edwards is the author of several books, including The Exhausted Dream and Photographs Taken at One-Hour Intervals During a Walk from Galveston Island to the West Texas Town of Marfa. He directs Canarium Books, teaches at the University of Chicago, and sometimes sells books at Marfa Book Company.

Sarah Matthes is a poet from central New Jersey. She is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as the poetry editor for ˆ. She has received support for her work from the Yiddish Book Center and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Her work can be found at the Iowa Review online, Prodigal, the Bad Version, Girlblood Info, the Feminist Utopia Project, and Yalobusha Review.

Danielle Wheeler was born in the Midwest and was the Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she completed her MFA. Her chapbook, Teenage Exorcists, is available from Slim Princess Holdings.

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

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

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

Join journalist and author Asher Elbein for the inaugural reading and signing of his new book, Ghost Days. Spooky fun likely. Refreshments a certainty.

Southern Appalachia, 1900. Anna O’Brien had a home, a husband, and a future. Now, cast out by tragedy and strange magic, she wanders the countryside on her wooden leg: living by her wits, settling spirits for her work, and never, ever looking back.

There are plenty of horrors ahead. Ancient things stir in the woods, awakened by the belching locomotives and logging cuts. Dark things yearn for a terrible savior on a remote hill. A bank heist runs afoul of an undead curse. Two women find themselves tormented by a relentless suitor. An omen of death dogs Anna’s heels. And deep in the land beneath mountains, a forgotten god offers a difficult gift. Anna O’Brien’s got a lot to learn. If she’s going to survive, she’d better learn fast…

A collection of linked short stories illustrated by concept artist Tiffany Turrill, Ghost Days is road trip through a land on the brink of massive upheaval and ecological collapse, a world of old traditions and remnant powers.

Asher Elbein is a journalist and short fiction writer based in Austin, Texas. He began writing fiction in high school, briefly set it aside to focus on narrative journalism, and now makes time in his life for both. His work has previously appeared in the New York Times, The Texas Observer, The Atlantic, Bitter Southerner, Oxford American, and Audubon. He likes hats, folk music, wandering back roads and wild places, looking for snakes, and listening to stories.

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

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.

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!

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!

artwork info: “No Traffic” by Makenna Hatter

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night will be a bit of a thriller, featuring a book launch for Joe Giordano’s new Anthony Provati novel, Drone Strike. Joe will be joined by Kathryn Lane and Phil Hewitt. Kathryn will be reading from her newest Nikki Garcia detective novel, Coyote Zone, and Phil will be sharing from Revenge of the Eagle.

In Drone Strike, Karim’s family is killed as ‘collateral damage’ by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq. The Islamic State in the Levant exploits his rage, recruiting him for a terrorist attack on the U.S., and only Anthony Provati can stop him. Drone Strike takes you on a fast-paced adventure across the Mediterranean, into Mexico, finally arriving in the States. Drone Strike explores the psychological realities that seduce Karim to commit an act of terror, includes a love story between Moslem Karim and Miriam, a Christian woman he defends in Turkey, and highlights the plight of Middle Eastern and Central American refugees.

As a former International Executive Vice President of 3M, Joe Giordano’s experience included running a business in the Middle East out of Athens, Greece. Born in New York, he’s had first-hand experience with the cultures and most of the locations in Drone Strike. Joe’s stories have appeared in more than one hundred magazines including The Saturday Evening Post and Shenandoah. His novels, Birds of Passage, An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story (2015) and Appointment with ISIL, an Anthony Provati Thriller (2017) were published by Harvard Square Editions. Joe was among one hundred Italian-American authors honored by Barnes & Noble Chairman Len Riggio to march in the 2017 Manhattan, Columbus Day Parade.

Kathryn Lane is the award-winning author of the Nikki Garcia series—Waking Up in Medellin and Coyote Zone. She sets her novels and short stories in exotic places, including the US-Mexico border states. Coyote Zone won first place in the Action/Adventure category in Latino Books into Movies 2018 contest. Her short story collection, Backyard Volcano, won Best Short Story Collection-2018 at Killer Nashville’s International Mystery Writers’ Conference. Waking Up in Medellin won Best Fiction Book of the Year 2017 at Killer Nashville’s International Mystery Writers’ Conference. She lives in The Woodlands, TX, with her husband, Bob Hurt. She loves all of the arts and is a member of the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers and artists talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world. This month’s Borderless will feature a conversation between ire’ne lara silva and Marilyse Figueroa.

ire’ne lara silva is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which were both finalists for the International Latino Book Award in Poetry, 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. Her latest collection of poetry, CUICACALLI/House of Song, was published by Saddle Road in April 2019.

Marilyse V. Figueroa is an unapologetic Scorpio just like Björk. They are a proud queer Xicanx-Boricua from Oklahoma and Tejas. They have been published in Acentos Review, St. Sucia Zine, and many others. You can catch this water sign writing poems, short fiction, or anything else that flows with their *feelings*. Marilyse works with youth and their writing whenever possible. They are currently the Regional Program Manager for Austin Bat Cave and Director of the San Marcos, Texas chapter of Barrio Writers Workshop.

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

Join us in celebrating the launch of Fernando A. Flores’ debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, one of Lit Hub and The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019 and one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com‘s Books to Read This Spring!

A parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking.

But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous, surreal, psychedelic journey, where he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers.

Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores’s debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, a dire warning against the one percent’s determination to dictate society’s decline, and a nuanced investigation of loss. It’s also the perfect introduction for Flores: a wonderfully weird, staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction, and a mythmaker of the highest order.

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and raised in the U.S. In 2018 his short story collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas was released by Host Publications.

Join us in celebrating the launch of a new issue of Echo Literary Magazine.

Echo Literary Magazine is a publication of the University of Texas at Austin’s Liberal Arts Honors Program. It showcases the work of UT undergraduates from all majors and programs. Echo accepts submissions of poetry, prose, and visual art, including photography.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Rubén Degollado’s Throw, a literary crossover novel set in ‘90s Rio Grande Valley. Rubén will be joined by ire’ne lara silva, Natalia Sylvester, and Gerard Robledo.

Llorona is the only girl Güero has ever loved. A wounded soul, she has adopted the name of a ghost from Mexican folklore. True to her namesake, Llorona cast Güero away with the coldness of the apparition she has become. But Güero—though he would never admit it to his friends—still wants to get back together with her.

Güero spends time with his friends Ángel and Smiley—members of the HCP (Hispanics Causing Panic) gang—roaming the streets of the South Texas border towns they inhabit, trying to forget Llorona even as she seems to appear around every corner.

Over three days Güero’s increasingly violent confrontations with Llorona’s current boyfriend will jeopardize the lives of Ángel and Smiley and the love he hopes to regain.

As events begin to accelerate toward their conclusion—and gang signs are thrown as both threats and claims of identity—the question arises: will Güero throw the HCP sign, or will he throw off that life? Güero’s life will be irrevocably changed by violence and loss, but who will he lose, and will he—somewhere along the way—lose himself?

Rubén Degollado is from the Río Grande Valley. His work has been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Image, Relief, and the anthologies Juventud, Fantasmas and Bearing the Mystery. He has been a finalist in American Short Fiction’s annual contest, Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Contest, and Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award. Throw is his debut novel, and is set in the border towns where he grew up.

ire’ne lara silva (above left) is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which were both finalists for the International Latino Book Award in Poetry, 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. Her latest collection of poetry, CUICACALLI/House of Song, was published by Saddle Road in April 2019.

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

Gerard Robledo (above right) is a Latino social justice poet from San Antonio, Texas. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, teaches creative writing at San Antonio College, and is the Associate Editor for Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Poetry & Arts Magazine. His Spanish language poetry translations and poetry have appeared in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Pilgrimage, The Thing Itself, Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a post 9/11 World, and The Texas Observer. Robledo is also one of the first sixteen poets to be archived in the San Antonio Poetry Archive at Palo Alto College and is a Macondo Writers’ Workshop Fellow.

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.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are  Claudia Delfina Cardona, Melanie Robinson, and Liz Clausen.

Claudia Delfina Cardona is a poet from San Antonio, Texas. She received her MFA from Texas State University. She is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Chifladazine, a publication that highlights the creative work of Latinas and Latinxs. Her poetry can be found in Cosmonauts Avenue, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Apogee. Claudia’s favorite flavor depends on the day, but she knows for certain that her sun is in strawberry, her moon is in chocolate, and her rising is cookies n cream.

Liz Clausen is a writer and graduate student at Texas State University’s MFA program. Her fiction has appeared in Fiction Southeast and delta journal. She’s a Louisiana native, and the proud owner of two crazy dogs. Her favorite ice cream flavor is non-dairy chocolate chip cookie dough.

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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

Join us for a reading with Skye Jackson, Benjamin Aleshire, and Josh Denslow. We’ll be celebrating the release of Skye’s new chapbook, A Faster Grave (Antenna Press).

Skye Jackson was born in New Orleans. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop where she serves as an associate poetry editor of Bayou Magazine. She is the author of the prizewinning chapbook, A Faster Grave, published by Antenna.

Benjamin Aleshire travels the world as a poet-for-hire, composing poems for strangers on a manual typewriter. His work has been featured recently in The Times UK, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and on television in the US, China, and Spain. An excerpt of his novel, ‘Poet for Hire: Kismet of a 21st Century Troubadour’ is forthcoming in LitHub. Ben was a Breadloaf waiter in 2016, and serves as assistant poetry editor for the Green Mountains Review. He lives in New Orleans.

Josh Denslow’s debut collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books) is a real book you can hold in your hands! In addition to constructing elaborate Lego sets with his three boys, he plays the drums in the band Borrisokane and edits at SmokeLong Quarterly.

Join us for a reading from members of Donna M. Johnson’s literary nonfiction workshop. Readers TBA.

Join us for a reading with Micah Bateman, Ash Smith, Daniel Eduardo Ruiz and Matthew Klane.

Micah Bateman is the author of a chapbook of poems, Polis, from the Catenary Press; the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award; and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Austin, where he’s at work on a Ph.D. dissertation, “#WebPoetsSociety: Poetry in the Digital Public Sphere.”

Ashley Smith Keyfitz (Ash Smith) is the author of Water Shed, Come Such Frequency, Pigeon of Tears and (forthcoming from Xexoxial Editions) Park of Unwired Asking. Formerly a publisher for LRL magazine and book series, she lives in Austin where she does web design, graphic, and community outreach work.

Daniel Eduardo Ruiz was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico and studies poetry at the Michener Center for Writers. A former Fulbright Scholar, his poems can be found in New Ohio Review, Juked, The Journal, and elsewhere.

Matthew Klane is co-editor at Flim Forum Press. His books include Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flim Forum, 2016), Che (Stockport Flats, 2013), and B (Stockport Flats, 2008). An e-chapbook from Of the Day is online at Delete Press and an e-book My is online at Fence Digital. Recent work is online or forthcoming at Barzakh, Homonym, Pulpmouth, and The Spectacle. He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY, where he curates the The REV Poetry Series and teaches at Russell Sage College.

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.

Austin Writers Roulette is a bimonthly uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Volcanic Summer”—under normal conditions, this would have NEVER happened. In addition to performing our theme-inspired works, everyone is invited to share their favorite Brian Grosz story or written piece that honors him. An open mic follows intermission. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

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

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! June’s theme is “Traveling Light” and the guests are Lucas Schaefer, Dalia Azim, S. Kirk Walsh, Nancy Koerbel, and Michael Fracasso (left to right, below).

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

Lucas Schaefer’s fiction has appeared in One Story and CRAFT. He has received a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and has been a recent resident at 100W Corsicana, the Studios of Key West, and the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. A graduate of the New Writers Project at UT-Austin, Lucas lives with his husband in Austin and is currently at work on a novel.

Dalia Azim’s writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train (where she won their Short Story Award for New Writers), Other Voices, and Sightlines, among other places. She is manager of special projects at the Blanton Museum of Art and is working on a novel.

S. Kirk Walsh’s work has appeared—or is forthcoming—in StoryQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, the New York Times Book Review, Longreads, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She lives in Austin, Texas, and is the founder of Austin Bat Cave, a writing and tutoring center for kids. Walsh has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is currently at work on a novel about Detroit, Michigan. 

Nancy Koerbel’s poems have recently appeared in Redactions, One, and The Pittsburgh Poetry Review. A former recipient of a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, she lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she teaches legal and business writing, works as a copyeditor for a large tech company, and coordinates the Pittsburgh branch of Why There are Words.

Michael Fracasso, musician, chef, and Austinite, is a genre-crossing artist incapable of repeating himself. His critically acclaimed work includes nine distinctive solo CDs, recorded duets with both Patty Griffin and Lucinda Williams, an epic reinterpretation of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” and memorable tributes to Woody Guthrie, Mickey Newbury and Townes Van Zandt. In 2011 he was short listed for the Austin Public Library Award for literary achievement.

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.

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

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

To celebrate our fourth birthday, we’ll have cake and a big ole heaping scoop of open mic performances from our women and non-binary community! Stay tuned for more party details!

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.

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 for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night authors are M. Ward Leon and J. Darris Mitchell.

M. Ward Leon’s new book, Blood of the Beast, is an action thriller featuring an international French eco-terrorist group waging a world war against poachers and big game hunters. And J. Darris Mitchell’s Fireflies and Cosmos: Interstellar Spring Book 1 is a humorous space opera about love in all of its forms.

M. Ward Leon is a former advertising creative director who started his career at Doyle Dane Bernbach, New York, during the Madmen era. While at DDB his writing on the Volkswagen Rabbit campaign won him inclusion into the Smithsonian Institution Advertising Archives. Recently his writing has earned him two National Emmy Awards for Public Service advertising. He recently became a published author, with his novel; The Blood of the Beast, published with Beacon Publishing Group. He is a graduate of California State University Los Angeles and an alumnus of Art Center College of Design.

J. Darris Mitchell is a native of Austin, TX who is obsessed with bringing biodiversity back to the city. He lives with his darling wife, his amazing son, a flock of chickens, a lazy cat, and a backyard brimming with wildflowers and insects.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers and artists talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world. This month’s Borderless guest is Raj Patel, co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet.

Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at the university currently known as Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa. In addition to numerous scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics and public health journals, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Times of India, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. His latest, co-written with Jason W. Moore, is A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.

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

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 for an evening with Emily O’Neill, E. Kristin Anderson, and Layne Ransom.

Emily O’Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican (2015), won YesYes Books’ inaugural Pamet River Prize, as well as the 2016 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Series in Poetry. Her second collection with YesYes, a falling knife has no handle (2018), was named one of the ten most anticipated poetry titles of fall by Publishers Weekly and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press. She is the author of five chapbooks and her recent work appears in Bennington Review, Catapult, Hypertrophic Literary, Little Fiction, Redivider, and Salt Hill, among others.

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and her work has been published worldwide in many magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press, forthcoming). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker.

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 for a discussion with Daisy Hernández, co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Daisy will be interviewed by Chaitali Sen.

Newly revised and updated, this landmark anthology offers gripping portraits of American life as seen through the eyes of young women of color.

It has been decades since women of color first turned feminism upside down, exposing the feminist movement as exclusive, white, and unaware of the concerns and issues of women of color from around the globe. Since then, key social movements have risen, including Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, and the activism of young undocumented students. Social media has also changed how feminism reaches young women of color, generating connections in all corners of the country. And yet we remain a country divided by race and gender. Now, a new generation of outspoken women of color offer a much-needed fresh dimension to the shape of feminism of the future. In Colonize This!, Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman have collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to the strength of community and the influence of color, to borders and divisions, and to the critical issues that need to be addressed to finally reach an era of racial freedom. With prescient and intimate writing, Colonize This! will reach the hearts and minds of readers who care about the experience of being a woman of color, and about establishing a culture that fosters freedom and agency for women of all races.

Daisy Hernández is the author of A Cup of Water under My Bed: A Memoir and the former editor of ColorLines magazine. She has written for National Geographic, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and currently teaches creative writing at Miami University in Ohio.

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

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Jasmine Waiters, Susan Niz, and Simone Warner.

Jasmine Waiters is an emerging spoken word poet from California. As an artist, she often uses raw truth, relentless imagery, and ambitious metaphors as a means for commentary and expression. In June of this year Jasmine released her poetry book, Before We Were Magic, and performed on an international stage for the first time. She traveled to Australia to perform at, and co-facilitate a workshop for the Emerging Writers Festival. She also headlined a feature performance for Slamalamadingdong Poet Slam while in Melbourne. Jasmine’s hope is that through spoken and written word she can promote healing, understanding, empowerment, and community. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is orange sherbet!

Susan Niz’s first poetry chapbook is Beyond this Amniotic Dream (Beard Poetry, Minneapolis, 2016). She has a second chapbook, Left-Handed Like a Lightning Whelk, forthcoming with Finishing Line Press (November 2019). Her short work has appeared in Ponder Review, Ginosko, Tipton Poetry Journal, Blue Bonnet Review, and other places. She has been featured in live poetry shows in Minneapolis and Austin. Susan writes across genres. Her novel Kara, Lost (North Star Press, 2011) was a finalist for a Midwest Book Award (MIPA) for Literary Fiction. She has a Master’s Degree in Education, raises kids, has been a grassroots community organizer, and conserves Monarchs. She recently relocated from Minnesota (having survived the Polar Vortex last winter) to the Austin area. She will be leading a poetry workshop at local libraries called “You are a poet.” Her favorite flavor of ice cream is salted caramel!

Simone Warner is passionate about language. She studied French at UT and currently translates commercial copy. She studied Creative Writing at ACC where her poetry habit found technique and where she opened to other genres. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is cookies and cream.

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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

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 for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published author/s will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night authors are Joseph Reid and Meg Gardiner. Joseph will be reading from his recent thriller, False Horizon, and Meg will also be reading from her most recent thriller, Into the Black Nowhere, the second novel in the UNSUB series, featuring rookie FBI agent Caitlin Hendrix.

“An exciting final battle, plenty of technical details, quirky characters, and the West Virginia setting all add up to a riveting, fast-moving thriller.” —Publishers Weekly

A commuter flight has fallen from clear skies over West Virginia, its wing sheared off at twenty thousand feet. Air marshal Seth Walker is called to the mountains of Appalachia to investigate. But what he stumbles into is a ground war as unpredictable and combustible as a mason jar full of nitroglycerin. Before he can even start searching for what might have downed the plane, Walker finds himself caught in the confounding—and deadly—cross fire between drone-deploying eco-terrorists, unstable frackers, ruthless drug smugglers, and armed miners pushed to the breaking point. The escalating mystery takes a personal turn as Seth gets closer to the truth about the money, power, and politics motivating everyone involved—including those Seth believed he could trust. Can he dodge the danger lurking in every hill and holler long enough to discover what may be the biggest threat of all?

Joseph Reid chased great white sharks as a marine biologist before becoming a patent lawyer who litigates multi-million-dollar cases for high-tech companies. He has flown millions of miles on commercial aircraft and has spent countless hours in airports around the world. These travel experiences spawn the backdrops for his novels, which he writes each morning before dawn breaks and the real world intrudes. His thrillers—Takeoff and False Horizon—feature federal air marshal Seth Walker, a former electrical engineer whose investigative cases force him to confront the dark past he left behind. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Duke University, and the University of Notre Dame Law School, Reid lives in San Diego with his wife and children.

“With a plot that moves at a breathless pace and a heroine with a history of her own issues, Gardiner’s gripping nail-biter will please fans of Alex Kava, Tami Hoag and even Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lechter novels. Be ready for requests.” –Booklist
Inspired by real-life serial killer Ted Bundy, Into the Black Nowhere is an exhilarating thriller in which FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix faces off against a charming, merciless serial killer.

Edgar-winning novelist Meg Gardiner writes thrillers. Fast-paced and full of twists, her books have been called “Hitchcockian” (USA Today) and “nailbiting and moving” (Guardian). They have been bestsellers in the U.S. and internationally and have been translated into more than 20 languages. Publishers Weekly calls Into the Black Nowhere, her current title, “excellent.” The first novel in the series, UNSUB, won the 2018 Barry Award for Best Thriller, and is in development as a television series by CBS. Meg was born in Oklahoma City and raised in Santa Barbara, California. She graduated from Stanford University, where she earned a B.A. in Economics. She went on to graduate from Stanford Law School. She practiced law in Los Angeles and taught in the Writing Program at the University of California Santa Barbara. Later she moved with her husband and three young children to London, where she began writing suspense novels. She hasn’t stopped. In addition to her fourteen novels, Meg has published short stories in American and British magazines and the anthology Echoes of Sherlock Holmes. She’s contributed essays to Now, Write! Mysteries, The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook, and the Anthony Award winning Books to Die For. Beyond writing, Meg is a three-time Jeopardy! champion and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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.

Austin Writers Roulette is a bimonthly uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Too-Woke Insomniac”—here’s what I do to sleep at night when the fate of the world depends on my political correctness. Our lineup of featured artists includes: RT KILGORE, ELLEN SWEETS, RG HOOK, STEPHANIE WEBB, HOPE RUIZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows intermission. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

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.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Tsz Kam and Juliana Maldonado.

Tsz Kam is a local painter here in Austin. Their favorite flavor of ice cream is strawberry. You can follow them on instagram at @tszkam_art.

Juliana Maldonado is a newly minted poet who has only just discovered the explosive beauty writing. She is currently unpublished, but hopes that will change soon. Juliana’s favorite flavor of ice cream is cookies and cream!

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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

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.

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

This month’s featured reader is Britta Jensen, who will be reading from Eloia Born, a Young Adult science fiction novel.

Britta Jensen’s debut novel Eloia Born was long-listed for the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. The sequel, Hirana’s War, releases in early summer 2020. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Henshaw Press and Fiction Factory prizes and she was published in the following anthologies: Stories for Homes, volume 2 and Sakura Dreams. Britta’s plays have been performed in New York City, Japan and South Korea. She holds a BA in Acting Performance from Fordham University and an MA in Teaching of English Literature from Columbia University and has taught in schools and therapeutic settings for fifteen years. Britta spent twenty-two years overseas in Japan, South Korea, and Germany before moving to Austin, Texas.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night authors are David Odle and Dustin McKissen. David will read from his Urban Fantasy novel, Markus. Dustin will read from The Poor and The Haunted, his first horror novel.

Markus Blue is one of the most powerful men alive. Fire from his hands can destroy armies and his battles are legendary. He is one of a rare breed called the warlock, one of the last of his kind and he is dying. But he must face one more battle, one more challenge or it will mean the end of the world as we know it.

David Odle discovered his love for writing at the age of thirteen while growing up in Warren County, Indiana. After seven years in the military and over thirteen years as an IT consultant living in Austin, Texas, he now resides right back in Indiana with his wife and five children where he is currently finalizing his next novel.

As a child Jimmy Lansford and his sister Kelly suffered crushing poverty, their father’s unexplained and frightening suicide, and their mother’s constant abuse and cruelty. Having grown to be a successful adult, Jimmy must contend with the sudden re-emergence of memories from his childhood in Oklahoma and unexplainable events occurring inside his own home. Is it more than memories that haunt Jimmy? Did his parents suffer from mental illness and addiction, or were they possessed by something even worse—and has that presence arrived to take Jimmy?

Dustin McKissen is an award-winning writer for a variety of publications. In addition to his non-fiction writing, Dustin is the author of the novel The Civil War at Home and the award-winning short stories Wife Number Six and My Name is Theodore Robert Bundy, and I am a Nixon Man. He lives in St. Charles, Missouri with his wife Megan and their three children. Dustin is a graduate of Prescott College and Northern Arizona University.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers and artists talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world. This month’s Borderless guest is Oscar Cásares.

Oscar Cásares is the author of Brownsville, a collection of stories that was an American Library Association Notable Book of 2004, and is now included in the curriculum at several American universities, and the novel Amigoland. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copernicus Society of America, and the Texas Institute of Letters. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin, where he lives. (Author photo credit: Joel Salcido.)

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

You’re invited to join us for another Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s theme is “Silver Linings” and the guests are Kathryn Schwille, Kristen Staby Rembold, Mark Solomon, Marian Szczepanski, and musical duo Joanna Howerton and Michael Cross.

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

Kathryn Schwille (top left) is the author of the novel What Luck, This Life, set in East Texas around the time of the Columbia shuttle disaster. It was selected by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as one of the best southern books of 2018. Her short stories have appeared in New Letters, Memorious, Crazyhorse, Literary Hub, and other journals, and have been cited twice for Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize. She lives in North Carolina and teaches at Charlotte Center for Literary Arts.

Kristen Staby Rembold’s (top center) most recent book is Music Lesson, poetry, published in 2019 by Future Cycle Press. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Leaf and Tendril and Coming into This World, and a novel, Felicity, winner of Mid-List First Fiction Series Award. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals including Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Literary Mama, Smartish Pace, and New Ohio Review. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is former co-editor of IRIS: A Journal About Women. She holds degrees from Northwestern University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Mark Solomon (top right) has lived in NYC since 1941. Since 1973 his poems have appeared in Broadway Boogie, TriQuarterly, Hanging Loose, BOMB, The Marlboro Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Southern Poetry Review. A chapbook, Her Whom I Summoned, and My True Body, his first full-length collection, are available through Havel.Havulim@gmail.com

Marian Szczepanski (bottom left) is the author of the historical novel Playing St. Barbara (High Hill Press, 2013), which Huffington Post called “a stunning debut novel that shimmers with unforgettable characters while casting necessary light on a dark chapter in American history.” She has won awards for short fiction and magazine writing and holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a faculty member at Houston’s Writespace creative writing center and has also taught for the Texas Writers League (Austin), Gemini Ink (San Antonio), Village Writing School (Eureka Springs and Rogers, AR), University of Pittsburgh’s Writers Café, and St. Francis University (Loretto, PA). She divides her time between Houston and Hood River, Oregon.

Joanna Howerton grew up in a musical family in the beautiful hills of Kentucky. In the Blues, she found her true voice and style and honed her vocal skills and played with various R&B and jazz ensembles in New Orleans and Austin. Her partnership and duo with Michael Cross has been transformative, inspiring the creation of a sound that bridges their past and current influences.

Michael Cross, a talented vocalist, lyricist, composer and seasoned recording artist, has toured nationally and internationally. Recording projects include TX Blues Voices, and his own album Blues Lovin’ Man. Michael’s latest collaboration with Joanna Howerton has inspired new material and their duo is steadily building an enthusiastic following.

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.

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 us for a reading with Texas State University faculty members. Featured readers include Steve Wilson, Kathleen Peirce, Roger Jones, John Blair, and Cecily Parks.

Steve Wilson’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide, as well as in four collections, the most recent titled Lose to Find. His new collection, The Reaches, is due out in November.

Kathleen Peirce is the author of Vault, The Ardors, The Oval Hour, Divided Touch/Divided Color, and Mercy. Among her awards are The Iowa Prize, a Whiting Award, The William Carlos Williams Award, and The AWP Prize. A fellow with The Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, she’s been teaching at Texas State University since 1993.

John Blair has published six books, most recently Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016), and is the recipient of multiple literary awards, including The Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Iowa Poetry Prize. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Texas State University.

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

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women and nonbinary writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Heather Lefebvre, Amanda Scott, and Rachel Gray.

Heather Lefebvre is a writer/editor from New Hampshire and essentially an icy birch tree at heart. She is the founder of Broad! Magazine and Scorpion Baby Press, a fiction reader with fields, and a member of the Lenguas Locx writers collective. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published with Hobart, Sycamore Review, SunMoon Missive, the first I Scream Social anthology, and elsewhere. In her free time, you can find her at karaoke or in the kitchen baking bread. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is dark chocolate, olive oil and sea salt (from Lick). Follow Heather online: IG: @moonwithmonocle / Twitter: @lefavor / website: heatherlefebvre.com

Amanda Scott is a Senior Lecturer at Texas State University, where she also serves as Assistant Executive Editor for Porter House Review. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, New South, phoebe, The Common, and elsewhere. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is dark chocolate raspberry. Follow Amanda on Twitter and IG here: @alizscott

Rachel Gray is a writer and educator living in Austin. She has been published in Two Serious Ladies and Hobart, and has won numerous awards for her work. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is pistachio.

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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

Join us for a reading from John Poch and Jacob Shores-Argüello.

John Poch is the author six collections of poetry, two which were published this year: Texases  (WordFarm Press) and Between Two Rivers (TTU Press—with photographer Jerod Foster). His work has been published in Poetry, Paris Review, the Nation, Yale Review, and other journals. He teaches at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet and prose writer. His second book Paraíso was selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize judged by Aracelis Girmay. He is a 2018/019 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Lannan Literary Fellow for Poetry. His work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Academy of American Poets, among others.

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 for an evening with Austin-based poet Usha Akella, who will be in conversation with Chaitali Sen.

Usha Akella has authored four books of poetry and one chapbook, and has scripted and produced one musical drama. Her latest poetry book was published by Sahitya Akademi, India’s highest literary authority, in 2019. She recently earned an 2018 MSt. in Creative Writing from Cambridge University, UK. Her work has been included in the Harper Collins’ Anthology of Indian English Poets. She was selected as a Creative Ambassador for the City of Austin for 2019 and 2015, and has been published in numerous literary journals. She is the founder of ‘Matwaala,’ the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US. She has won literary prizes (Nazim Hikmet award, Open Road Review Prize, and Egan Memorial Prize), and earned finalist status in a few US based contests. She has written a few quixotic nonfiction prose pieces published in The Statesman and India Currents. She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin, which takes poetry readings to the disadvantaged in women’s shelters, senior homes, and hospitals. Several hundreds of readings have reached these venues via this medium.

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

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.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night authors are Mark Falkin, Amy Gentry, and Jeff Abbott.

Mark will read from his post-apocalyptic novel The Late Bloomer; Amy will read from a psychological thriller, Last Woman Standing; and Jeff will read from The Three Beths, a psychologically intense suspense novel about a daughter’s desperate search for her missing mother.

Depicting an unspeakable apocalypse unlike any seen in fiction―there are no zombies, viruses or virals, no doomsday asteroid, no aliens, no environmental cataclysm, no nuclear holocaust―with a Holden Caulfieldesque protagonist at his world’s end, The Late Bloomer is both a companion piece to Lord of the Flies and a Bradburyian Halloween tale.

Mark Falkin is the author of the novels The Late Bloomer, Contract City, and Days of Grace. Born and raised in Tulsa, Mark graduated from Southern Methodist University then the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Working on his next novel, a tragicomedy set in Austin and Great Britain, he lives with his wife and daughters in Austin where he is a literary agent and recovering music attorney, having represented platinum sellers and Grammy winners alike. He used to vocalize in a band that rocked and rolled.

Dana Diaz is an aspiring stand‑up comedian—a woman in a man’s world. When she meets a tough computer programmer named Amanda Dorn, the two bond over their struggles in boys’ club professions. Dana confides that she’s recently been harassed and assaulted while in L.A., and Amanda comes up with a plan: they should go after each other’s assailants, Strangers on a Train–style. But Dana finds that revenge, however sweet, draws her into a more complicated series of betrayals. Soon her distrust turns to paranoia, encompassing strangers, friends—and even herself. At what cost will she get her vengeance? Who will end up getting hurt? And when it’s all over, will there be anyone left to trust?

Amy Gentry is the author of two psychological suspense novels, Good As Gone and Last Woman Standing, as well as a book of music criticism for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele. Amy holds a doctorate in English from the University of Chicago. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, Paris Review, LA Review of Books, Austin Chronicle, and Electric Literature. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Abbott uses his skills as a master storyteller to convey a complicated and ambitious tale that seems straightforward but is full of twists and red herrings. He also keeps the story moving without falling into clichés or over-the-top revelations. The mystery works because of the terrific characters and the beautiful road map he unveils while navigating the reader through a complex landscape. ―The Washington Post

Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty suspense novels. His books have been selected as Summer Reads by The Today Show, Good Morning America, and USA Today. He has been a bestseller in the UK, France, and many other countries. His latest is The Three Beths.

Join us in celebrating the recent launch of Paul D. Dickinson’s Junker Dreams: An Automotive Memoir. With readings from Paul and special guest W. Joe Hoppe.

Full of grit, humor and a mystical urban romanticism, this debut book of prose from a poet soars through a landscape of broken hearts, broken machines, and the strident desire to live a fiercely uncommon life. From New Orleans to New York City and the miles of lost highway in between, Dickinson illuminates a colorful universe as it unfolds behind the wheel of these banged up yet beloved hunks of steel.

Paul D. Dickinson is a poet and musician, born in 1966 in St. Paul, MN. His writing has appeared in Conduit, City Pages, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Dickinson has been in three films: The Last City in the East; Tired Moonlight; and The Lake Street Detective. He is currently the host of the Riot Act Reading Series.

W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.

Austin Writers Roulette is a bimonthly uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

This month’s theme is “Wildest Dreams”—this is my larger-than-life fantasy/nightmare. Our featured artists include: STEPHANIE WEBB, RON SEYBOLD, PAUL WEBSTER, NICOLE CORTICHIATO, TERRY DAWSON, JONATHAN WOODS, ROBERT CARRANZA, ILENE HADDAD, GARRET ANDERSON, TERESA Y. ROBERSON and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows intermission. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

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

This month’s featured reader is Héctor Aguayo.

Héctor Aguayo has been published in literary magazines like Al Principio, El Cid, Reporte Austin, Rainbow Groove, and The Rio Review. He understood that by using his voice he would bring representation to the Chicano experience and the struggle of neither identifying as North American nor Mexican. He’s also a LGBTQIA advocate pursuing inclusivity.

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.

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Gabriella C. Cruz and Marilyse V. Figueroa.

Gabriella C. Cruz is a proud mama. Chicana. Poeta. “I use writing and poetry to explore the depths of my humanity and to connect to others and the natural world. Themes I gravitate toward include the lost and unspoken aspects of motherhood, fierce femininity, love, the cycles and wonder of nature and the human body, to birth and human rebirth manifested through personal growth. Sometimes I write about pancakes and spaghetti, too.” Her favorite flavor of ice cream is Death Metal by Chocolate from Sweet Ritual!

*** Our Halloween edition features spooky tunes, costume contests & prizes, plus, of course, candy and ice cream! ***

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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

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 for a conversation between visiting translator Rosalind Harvey and host Sean Manning as they discuss topics such as translating voices, particularly in regards to her latest work Juan Pablo Villalobos’ The Other Side, a collection of stories from Central American teen refugees crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Their conversation will also be recorded for Adriana Pacheco’s Hablemos Escritoras podcast.

Rosalind Harvey (above left) is an award-winning literary translator, and has taught translation at undergraduate and postgraduate level at the universities of Roehampton, Bristol, and Warwick. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and her translation of his work I’ll Sell You A Dog was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and commended for the 2018 Valle-Inclán prize. She has worked on books by Guadalupe Nettel, Elvira Navarro, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, amongst others. She is a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, an online community for early-career literary translators, and speaks regularly on the topic of getting into the profession and surviving. She is a 2016 Arts Foundation Fellow, and in 2018 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently working on a collection of Peruvian short stories and an Argentine play, and her latest publication is a YA title by Villalobos about the journeys made by teenage Central American immigrants when they cross over illegally to the United States. She lives in Coventry in the West Midlands.

Sean Manning (above center) is a Lecturer who teaches courses on language, literature, and writing in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature. He is also a literary translator and has translated numerous works including Eduardo Lalo’s The Elements, Azahara Palomeque’s American Poems, Carlos Pereda’s Lessons in Exile, and a collection of short stories from Lorenzo García Vega titled Falconry With Puppets. He is currently working on translations of Carlos Pereda’s latest book Destructions and Nomadic Thought and a novel by Argentine writer Diego Vecchio. He also co-edited No dicen nada, cantan, an anthology of poetry from the late Uruguayan poet and U.T. professor Enrique Fierro set to be published this year by Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Dr. Adriana Pacheco (above right) was born in Puebla, Mexico and is a naturalized American Citizen. She sits on and is former Chair at the International Board of Advisors at University of Texas-Austin. She is Affiliate Research Fellow at Llilas Benson, and co-founder of the Nineteenth-Century scholar section of LASA. Her research in the construction of feminine subjectivity from the nineteenth century onwards from the perspective of critical and postcolonial theories and cultural and historiographic studies has earned her multiple scholarships and grants. A Texas Book Festival Feature Author (2012), Dr. Pacheco has several publications in collective books and magazines like Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and Letras Libres, among others. Currently she is working on the book “Virile Angels,” Much More Than “Angels of the Home.” Female Education in Mexican Nineteenth-Century Catholic Newspapers and a collective Para seguir rompiendo con la palabra. Dramaturgas, cineastas, periodistas y ensayistas mexicanas contemporáneas. She is founder and producer of Hablemos Escritoras podcast and Proyecto Escritoras Mexicanas Contemporáneas.

Hablemos Escritoras podcast is a weekly podcast that focuses on the work, influences, publications, awards, and trajectory of contemporary female writers and translators of Spanish, and explores topics related to literature, culture, and society. In its more than 70 episodes it has interviewed authors from around the world. It can be heard on Soundcloud, Applepodcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

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.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers and artists talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world. This month’s Borderless guest is Varian Johnson.

Varian Johnson is the author of nine novels, including The Parker Inheritance, which was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, an Odyssey Honor Audiobook and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book; and The Great Greene Heist, which was named to over twenty-five state reading and best-of lists. He received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he now serves as a member of the faculty. Varian lives outside of Austin, TX with his family.

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

Join us for an evening with Dobby Gibson and Fernando Flores.

Dobby Gibson’s new book of poetry is Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press), which received a starred review from Shelf Awareness, and which The Washington Post calls “smart and crisp.” He is the author of three previous collections, including It Becomes You (Graywolf Press), which was shortlisted for The Believer Poetry Award. A recent visiting poet at UT-Austin, he lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and raised in the U.S. In 2018 his short story collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas was released by Host Publications. His debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, was released in 2019 and was one of Lit Hub and The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019 and one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com‘s Books to Read This Spring!

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.

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

Ehigbor Shultz (B.A. Plan II Honors, Neurolinguistics, English, Cert. Chemistry, Pre-Medical studies, UT Austin ’16) is a multi-ethnic writer. Although she is now based in Austin, she has travelled and lived in many different places around the world and is multilingual as a result. She writes African mythology based YA epic fantasy, YA and adult contemporary fiction, thriller mysteries, and heartfelt poetry. She writes for all the unseen, marginalized girls and women who grew up seeing too much of the world’s pain and receiving its burdens. You may not know her name in publishing, but she hopes one day you will. She hopes that those who read and hear her work can take a piece of it with them and allow it to color their worlds and perspectives. She’s always up for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, and is happy to provide you one as well, should you so need it.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. And we’ll also have “Book Talk,” in which an intrepid Malvern staff member will introduce you to one of our favorite prose titles. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night authors are H. Claire Taylor and Jonathan Woods.

A reluctant messiah. A power-hungry preacher. The hilarious battle for hearts and minds is only beginning… Jessica McCloud knows firsthand that it’s impossible to fit in when you’re God’s only begotten daughter. While the girl possesses the power to smite and a direct line to the Almighty, she’d give it all up for a few more friends … or a reliable set of God-proof earplugs…

H. Claire Taylor is the author of the Jessica Christ series, a comedy about the life of God’s only begotten daughter, and has published over two dozen novels under various pen names. When she’s not writing, you can find her buried in a book, thinking deeply about ghosts, or soaking up the Texas sun.

Like Hunter S. Thompson crossbred with Gil Brewer, Woods revels in paranoia, hallucinations, hapless saps, and language both playful and profane. Exuberantly shotgunning pulp-fiction clichés (from Mexican sojourns to Nazi scientists), he slathers on film noir homage and shakes until it explodes like the radioactive suitcase at the end of Kiss Me Deadly. Pulpy, pervy fun for those who like the wild stuff. —Keir Graff, Booklist

Jonathan Woods lives a pulp fiction existence in the Texas hill country. He is the author of the
Spinetingler Award winner Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem; A Death in Mexico; Phone Call from Hell and Other Tales of the Damned; and Kiss the Devil Good Night. His new novel Hog Wild is forthcoming.

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 for an afternoon with poet T.D. Walker, who will read from her recent collection, Small Waiting Objects. With special guests August Huerta and Holly Lyn Walrath.

In the near future, kitchen appliances question, console, and bewilder their owners. Extraterrestrials leave behind sub-dermal implants and complicated daughters. A second moon settles into orbit around Earth, a moon which challenges those beneath it to see it, to name it, to explore it. And crew members aboard starships turn to fine and pulp art as consolation. The lyric poems in Small Waiting Objects reach back to feminist utopias and onward toward possible futures in which we find ourselves resisting the technologies-and their human implications-that we most desire.

“Are we really just one generation away from seismograph implants, or does it just feel that way? Like a second moon, T.D. Walker’s eerie, speculative poems may cause readers to recalibrate themselves. Let this book be your bus to Oz.”
— Jessy Randall

T.D. Walker is the author of Small Waiting Objects (CW Books 2019), a collection of near-future science fiction poems. Her poems and stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, The Future Fire, Web Conjunctions, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Recompose, Abyss & Apex, Kaleidotrope, The Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere. After completing graduate work in English Literature, Walker began her career as a software developer. She draws on both her grounding in literary studies and her experience as a computer programmer in writing poetry and fiction.

August Huerta is a poet based in Austin, Texas. They are a graduate from The New Writers Project and have been featured in Raspa Magazine and Strange Horizons, where you can find their poem “Concerning Jimmy Carter and the UFO Sighting.”

Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, Liminality, and elsewhere. She is the author of the Elgin Award winning chapbook Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver.

Join us for a night with spoken word artists Joaquín Zihuatanejo and Taria Person.

Joaquín Zihuatanejo is a brilliant poet. His testimonials and songs and explorations are multilingual, structurally adventurous. The wide range of forms and dictions makes visible his ravenous curiosity and intellect. His language, rippling with the loss of a father and racial and cultural tensions, resists one-dimensional answers. His nouns and verbs wonder, croon, weep, question, and roar. The deep attention to language and to the shaping of language infuses the work with a riveting self-awareness of the self—in this case, a Mexican American man unafraid to remember, to love. Beautifully crafted and richly imagined, Arsonist is a remarkable debut. —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

Joaquín Zihuatanejo received his MFA in creative writing with a concentration in Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work has been featured in Prairie Schooner, Sonora Review, and Huizache, among other journals and anthologies. His poetry has been featured on HBO, NBC, and on NPR in Historias and The National Teacher’s Initiative. He was the winner of the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. His book, Arsonist, was published by Anhinga Press in September of 2018, and was short-listed as a Finalist for both the Writers’ League of Texas Best Book Poetry Prize and the International Latino Book Award Best Book Poetry Prize. Joaquín has two passions in his life, his wife Aída and poetry, always in that order.

Taria Person is an alumna of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she received a dual B.A. in English Creative Writing: Poetry, and Interdisciplinary Studies: Africana Studies. She is the author of Rainbow Elephant and At the Summit, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including: O’ Woman a Tapestry of Loving You, and Voices of Warriors: Poems of Hope & Healing. Taria Person won first place at the regional Big Ears: Spoken Word Expo/The 5th Woman Poetry Slam (2017), the Regional Southern Fried Hip-Hop Slam (2013), and Knoxville Poetry Slam (2012). Also, she has been an actress and Production Stage Manager for The Carpetbag Theatre Inc., during its original series of stage productions that have been funded by The Roy Cockrum Foundation, in celebration of (CBT’s) 50th Anniversary. Recently, Person has been commissioned to write a book of poetry by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation; won an Artistic Professional Development grant from Alternate Roots for her original stage play, Hangers; and became a member of the 5th Woman Touring Collective.

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!

Austin Writers Roulette is a bimonthly uncensored, theme-inspired spoken word and storytelling event. It features a different monthly theme and line up of artists who perform their original written works such as poetry, essays, spoken word, singer-songwriting, or excerpts from novels for 5-8 minutes (1200 words or fewer). Interested artists who would like to perform for an upcoming event can email their submission to mathdreads@yahoo.com. Or you can show up during the day of the event and sign up for the open mic after all the featured artists perform. And of course, performance art lovers are always welcome!

THE AUSTIN WRITERS ROULETTE presents its GRAND FINALE event, “Creative Contemplations”—these are the things I’ll be dreaming and scheming for 2020. This special lineup includes artists from across the 8 years of Rouletter spoken word, music and storytelling: ALLYSON WHIPPLE, LARRY MAYFIELD, BIRDMAN 313, DONNA DECHEN BIRDWELL, JIM TENNY, DANIEL DAVILA, HOPE RUIZ, RG HOOK, NICOLE CORTICHIATO, PAUL NORMANDIN, BRENNAN UTLEY, STEPHANIE WEBB, URSULA PIKE, TERESA Y. ROBERSON & THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

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

This month we’re proud to present Professor Joe Hoppe’s Poetry & Prose Class reading their work as the final literary event of 2019.

Join us for an evening with writers Carmen Gray and William Jensen. They’ll be sharing excerpts from short stories that appear in Road Kill Volume IV: Texas Horror by Texas Writers.

Carmen Gray is a teacher, Master Reiki practitioner, and writer who lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her published work in the Naga Review online, on her blog walkersonthejourney.com, in Poet’s Choice and in Road Kill, Volume I. Her latest short fiction piece, “The Smoke’s Gotta Go Somewhere,” is in the fall 2019 edition of Road Kill Volume IV: Texas Horror by Texas Writers.

William Jensen is the author of the novel Cities of Men. His short fiction has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Texas Review, Tinge Magazine, and elsewhere. He has received multiple Pushcart nominations. His story, “You Can Outrun The Devil if You Try,” is in the fall 2019 edition of Road Kill Volume IV: Texas Horror by Texas Writers. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Join us for another installment of Novel Night, a monthly celebration of all things prose! Here’s how it works: published authors will read from their books and there’ll be an audience Q & A. Also worth noting: we’re offering 20% OFF ALL FICTION TITLES during Novel Night (from 6pm till closing).

This month’s Novel Night authors are Samantha Inman and Bennett Donovan.

A thirty-five year cold case lands on her desk after a violent encounter left Alena Martin scarred. Not knowing where to start, she chooses a different perspective altogether, but the case follows her to the ancient city of Alexandria, Egypt when two women go missing. With no time on her side Detective Martin must ask the right questions and save herself in the process or she loses everything in the sound of a gunshot.

Samantha Inman has a bachelors degree in Theatre, and an extensive background and love for the arts. She published her debut novel in the summer of 2019 and is already working on future projects.

Two aspiring artists meet at a backyard party in Austin. They form a bond and agree to an adventure that will change their lives forever. What follows is a white-knuckle odyssey deep into the Texas Hill Country. Faced with a series of unforeseen obstacles, Conor and Emma must not only survive the harsh landscape but also confront the very nature of the relationship that they are forging.

Bennett Donovan came to Austin in 1991 and became the cliche of the UT student who never leaves. He’s gone through a few versions of himself from Dean of Students at Kirby Hall School to teaching history at UT, ACC, and St. Ed’s to working for the successful local tech startup Convio. He’s currently a Director in the non-profit division of the San Francisco tech giant Salesforce. Devil’s Sinkhole is Bennett’s first novel. Reviewers have called it an “intelligent, entertaining short novel,” a “philosophical thriller… in which the action is just as important as the stream of ideas,” and “sharp, deep, and… darkly funny.”

Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women and nonbinary writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month we’re welcoming Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and our I Screamers are KB, Faylita Hicks, and Alana Torrez.

This month is our special annual holiday edition! Ugly sweaters strongly encouraged!

KB [they/them] is a Black queer nonbinary poet, editor, and educator currently based in Austin, TX. They’ve received fellowship invitations from the Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, The Hurston/Wright Foundation, and others. Their poetry appears in The Cincinnati Review, The Matador Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Shade Journal, and elsewhere. When they’re not on stage or in the page, they serve as Program Coordinator for the Gender and Sexuality Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Curator/Host of ATX Interfaces, Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and proud member of Lenguas Locxs Writers Collective. They’re currently the Spring 2020 guest editor for Foglifter Press. Their favorite flavor of ice cream is pecan pralines & cream.

Faylita Hicks (she/her/they) is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), Managing Editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, an organizer with Mano Amiga, and a finalist for the 2018 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. Hicks was a 2019 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow for Nonfiction, a 2019 Jack Jones Literary Arts “Culture, Too” Conference Gender/Sexuality Fellow, a 2019 Palette Poetry Spotlight Award Finalist, a winner of Catapult’s 2019 Black History Month Scholarship, and has received a residency from the Vermont Studio Center, and is a 2020 Tin House Winter Workshop Creative Nonfiction Fellow. Their work is published or forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Adroit, Linden Avenue, Foglifter, The Rumpus, Sundog Lit, The Cincinnati Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, SLATE Magazine, Huffington Post, Texas Observer, Color Bloq, and others. Their favorite flavor of ice cream is banana brownie!

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.

~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.

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