Malvern Books

Join us for an evening of poetry and soundscapes with Kim Vodicka, who will read from her poetry collection Psychic Privates. With musical accompaniment by Josh Stevens, and featuring Taylor Gorman.

Poet. Nihilist. Spokesbitch of a Degeneration. Beavis in Scorpio. Moon in Roseanne. Penis in Uranus. Venus in ASS GLAM! Kim Vodicka is the author of two poetry collections: Aesthesia Balderdash (Trembling Pillow Press, 2012) and Psychic Privates (White Stag, 2018 [forthcoming]). She is also responsible for the Psychic Privates EP (TENDE RLOIN, 2017), the world’s first poetry chapbook on 7” vinyl, as well as the Psychic Privates comic book series (Oily Pelican Press). Her poems, art, and other creative abominations have been featured in Spork, Epiphany, Industrial Lunch, Smoking Glue Gun, Luna Luna Magazine, Paper Darts, The Volta, Tarpaulin Sky, Makeout Creek, Mojo, Best American Experimental Writing (BAX) 2015, and many others.

Josh Stevens (above left) is a Memphis-based multi-instrumentalist. A singer/songwriter by day and psychedelic sonic architect by night, he has an affinity for all things pedals and noises that project onto as many astral planes as possible. When he’s not making strange esoteric sounds, you’ll generally find him locking into the groove behind the drum kit with many bands, some of whom you may know, in any town that will have them. A luthier by trade, he follows his prowess and love for music to its core structure and foundation, analyzing all the details, eager to find out just what makes the pieces tick.

Taylor Gorman (above right) graduated from LSU in Creative Writing and received his MFA from Wichita State University. His work has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Passages North, Cutbank, and The Cincinnati Review. He lives in Austin, TX with his cat.

Austin Writers Roulette is an 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 Austin Writers Roulette presents “A Dark & Stormy Night” to whet your appetite for Halloween. The lineup of featured artists includes BIRDMAN 313, MICHELLE SAVAGE-MENA, CATHRIN GORDON, MARIA CLARK, STEPHANIE WEBB, TERESA Y. ROBERSON & THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows the featured artists line up. 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.

October’s featured reader ANNAR VEROLD is a Honduran-American poet and screenwriter. A former Creative Writing student at ACC and a graduate of St. Edward’s University, her work has appeared in the Spoon River Poetry Review and is forthcoming in the second Aural Literature anthology. She works for Host Publications, and is co-curator of the I Scream Social reading series.

An open mic follows, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

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 we’ll be celebrating the launch of two new titles! Scott Semegran will be reading from his novel Sammie & Budgie, the quirky, mystical tale of a self-doubting IT nerd and his young son, who possesses the gift of foresight. And A. K. Fagan will be reading from Worldwalker.

Scott Semegran lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, four kids, two cats, and a dog. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English. He is a writer and a cartoonist. He can also bend metal with his mind and run really fast, if chased by a pack of wolves. His comic strips have appeared in the following newspapers: The Austin Student, The Funny Times, The Austin American-Statesman, Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, Seven Days, The University of Texas at Dallas Mercury, and The North Austin Bee. Books by Scott Semegran include Sammie & Budgie, BOYS, The Meteoric Rise of Simon Burchwood, The Spectacular Simon Burchwood, Modicum, Mr. Grieves and more. He is a Kindle bestselling author.

Born and raised in Austin, Texas, A. K. Fagan is a long-time aspiring author. Her first adventure/fantasy novel, Worldwalker, Book One of the Nakano series, debuted on December 19th, 2016  with the help of friends, family, and online fans. Fagan has been writing adventure/fantasy stories online for several years before the publication of Worldwalker and has garnered the support from the online writing community. Fagan is a Creative Writing major and enjoys sushi, Indian food, and like any good American, hamburgers. She has a fat Siamese cat, Nero, who is an aspiring model and constantly disgruntled by everything. She also enjoys playing RPGs, reading, and watching anime. Other hobbies include travel, learning new languages, and studying psychology. She also has a great interest in other cultures, especially Eastern. Japan and China are major influences on her works and especially on Worldwalker. The fusion of Western and Eastern attitudes and ethics is a large factor in the Nakano series, blending Japanese and Chinese historical trends with the perspective of an average college student from the United States in the 21st century.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kurt Heinzelman’s new book of poetry, Whatever You May Say. With readings from Kurt and Danielle Sellers.

Kurt Heinzelman’s new book of poetry, Whatever You May Say, resembles what would have been called a “miscellany” in the 18^th-century, the most popular way of constructing a poetry collection back then. Such miscellanies would include poems in many different genres and modes exhibiting a wide variety of formal characteristics. The poems might be spoken by multiple voices, and the collections would certainly include translations, another way of introducing voices not the author’s own. Heinzelman co-founded in the 1970s a highly regarded journal called The Poetry Miscellany. True to this origin, his new book includes an array of poetic forms (sonnet, photoessay, haiku, Provençal canso, Spanish “mote,” a valedictory address, and so on), narrative settings both foreign and domestic, a short one-person play (which was originally performed as a dance), and multiple translations, including one that is a poem for children. Heinzelman’s writing is “always a pleasure,” according to Lawrence Raab; this is “not a book to miss,” says Wendy Barker.

A native of Wisconsin, Kurt Heinzelman lived for a number of years in western Massachusetts. His work as a poet, scholar, and translator is widely published. He is also an editor, having co-founded two literary journals, The Poetry Miscellany and Bat City Review, and served as editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. He lives in Austin, Texas where he is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Texas and is a faculty member in the Michener Center for Writers.

Danielle Sellers is from Key West, FL. She has an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she held the John Grisham Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, The Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Her first book, Bone Key Elegies, was published by Main Street Rag. Her second poetry collection, The Minor Territories, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2018. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.

Join us for an evening with acclaimed writer and artist Eduardo Lalo, hosted by César A. Salgado.

The event will feature a bilingual reading from Lalo’s most recent book, Uselessness; a reading from a work-in-progress, Intemperie, a collection of Cioran- and Wittgenstein-like philosophical vignettes (with Sean Manning reading the English parts of these works); a conversation between Lalo, Salgado, and Manning about what the translation into English of Lalo’s past and recent work entails and implies, and a signing of some of Lalo’s recent books.

An award-winning Puerto Rican writer, essayist, photographer, and visual artist, Eduardo Lalo is known for cross-genre books that express his passion for both words and images. Among his titles are La Isla Silente (2002), Los Pies De San Juan (2002), La Inutilidad (2004), Donde (2005), Los Países Invisibles (2008), El Deseo Del Lápiz (2010), Necrópolis (2014), and Intemperie (2016). In 2013 he won the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for Simone (2011), now available in English from The University of Chicago Press. His visual work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. He was LLILAS Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2016. Known for razor sharp columns in the island’s press, Lalo is today among the most outspoken and resolute critics of recurring colonialism in Puerto Rico and the world.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Alisar Eido’s novel, Fate of Smoke (The Soulfire Series: Book 1). Eido will be joined by David Tucker and Brennan Utley.

Something stirs in the Beyond. A creature Death once banished is clawing its way skyward in search of the last mortal sharing its ancient bloodline. The beast will stop at nothing, raising all manner of horrors, even the Four Horsemen themselves, for the sole purpose of finding and destroying one girl. Verenna. Nothing in the Canterford girl’s comfortable life could have prepared her to navigate the dangers she faces. Armed with only a fiery temper and a quick mind, Verenna is no match for the powers of the Underworld. That is, until she becomes an unwilling guest to a company of outcasts who claim they can help. But the group may have a dark secret of their own… 

Alisar Eido is a freelance writer of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and plays. Her writing is made unique by her imagistic style, dark mind, and twisted sense of humor. After graduating from UT Austin, she briefly ran her own business before returning to her original passion for writing. Over the years her work has come to span realistic fiction, comedy, horror, sci-fi, and now with the publication of her first book, dark fantasy and the paranormal. Her debut novel, Fate of Smoke, is the first book of a trilogy entitled The Soulfire Series. She is now living and working in Austin, Texas, and looking forward to the publication of the second book in her trilogy in the Summer of 2018.

Brennan Utley is an emerging author based in Austin who blends realist, fabulist, science fiction, and satirical traditions into his unique and often darkly funny stories and aspiring novels. He is currently working late into the night on a handful of new projects and teaches in Bastrop, Texas.

HALLOWEEN EDITION: Get your spook on with us at this month’s I Scream. Costumes encouraged!

Get your cones ready for another installment of Malvern Books’ newest FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld & Schandra Madha.

Featuring young women poets and fiction writers from the Austin community, this month’s I Screamers are Kelsey Williams, Jourden Sander, and Sunny Leal. They’re all rock stars, and we’re thrilled to be featuring them.

And did we mention the free cool confections from Amy’s Ice Cream & Sweet Ritual?

~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic. Bring old stuff, new stuff, silly stuff, whatever stuff. Just read stuff to us.

~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 Kathryn Lane’s Backyard Volcano and Other Mysteries of the Heart, an anthology of short stories from Alamo Bay Press. Kathryn will be joined by Lowell Mick White.

These stories help define the world of the Texas-Mexico Frontier—an explosive world where lives break, loves shatter, and healing happens. Kathryn Lane, a native of Mexico, explores this world, leading readers on a journey through time and geography with the promise of magic and transformation. Lane’s short fiction contains a fusion between fantasy and reality, often layered with symbolism and punctuated by hints of surrealism.

Award-winning author Kathryn Lane writes fiction inspired by Latin American cultures she experienced during her career as an international finance executive and in her life growing up in Mexico. Her debut novel, Waking Up in Medellin, was recognized with a Killer Nashville Silver Falchion for Best Fiction Book of the Year 2017 and a second Silver Falchion for Best Fiction Adult Suspense 2017. Her novel also received a Pinnacle Achievement Award in Fiction. She is a 2017 finalist for the RONE Award in the Mystery category. In 2017, the novel was also released in Spanish, under the title Despertando en Medellín. Association of Writers and Writing Programs featured Kathryn on the Arriba Baseball! panel in Seattle (2014). She has been recognized in her community with a Montie Award for Excellence in the Arts, and as a member of the Rotary Club, she has twice been honored with the Paul Harris Award. She lives in Texas with her husband Bob Hurt, where she serves on the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council.

Lowell Mick White is the author of three books: Professed and That Demon Life, novels, and Long Time Ago Good, a story collection. Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award and a Dobie-Paisano Fellow, White teaches at Texas A&M University.

Join us for an evening with Manuel Gonzales and Owen Egerton.

Manuel will read from his debut novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack! Weaving in a brilliantly conceived mythology, fantastical magical powers, teenage crushes, and kinetic fight scenes, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is a seismically entertaining novel about revenge and allegiance and love.

The Regional Office is Under Attack! is an entertaining and satisfying novel. Like the best of the stories it satirizes so gently, it’s rollicking good fun on the surface, action-packed and shiny in all the right places; underneath that surface, though, it’s thoughtful and well considered.  Gonzales has created a superheroic fighting force of the kind we’ve grown so used to through constant exposure to the Avengers and various iterations of the X-Men, and then he has turned out their pockets and flipped open their diaries. —New York Times Book Review

Manuel Gonzales is the author of the novel The Regional Office is Under Attack!, and the collection of stories, The Miniature Wife. He is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, KY.

Owen Egerton is the author of the novels, Hollow, Marshall Hollenzer is Driving, The Book of Harold and Everyone Says That at the End of the World, and the story collection, How Best to Avoid Dying. He’s also the writer/director of the psychological horror film Follow and forthcoming Blood Fest. As a screenwriter, Egerton has written for Fox, Disney, and Warner Brothers. His essays have appeared in The Huffington Post and Salon. He cowrote the creative writing guide This Word Now with his wife, poet Jodi Egerton. Egerton also hosts NPR’s The Write Up. He’s been voted Austin’s best writer by readers of the Austin Chronicle seven times.

This event is sponsored by Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Kathleen Peirce’s Vault. With readings from Kathleen and Lisa Olstein, and hosted by Cecily Parks.

Find here: poetry’s virtues/pleasures. Gorgeous witness. Silence muscled with qualities. Net of attentiveness rippling outward from the meeting of the seer and the seen. Kin to The Tempest: the wondrous woven of the mundane. The strength of purpose and hearkening needed to walk in beauty’s strangeness. Its sensuousness; its intimacy (especially with necessity) that supples its language. Patience of soul spun into physical brilliance. Time present and antique, interior and exterior, “feather of hair in one hand, / scissors in another, not the heart / beating but what might return over the heart.” These are the most beautiful poems I know. —Liz Waldner

Vault is Kathleen Peirce’s fifth book of poetry. Previous work has been awarded The AWP Award for Poetry, The Iowa Prize, and The William Carlos Williams Award. Her writing has been supported by the National Foundation for the Arts, The Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A member of the faculty with Texas State’s MFA program in Creative Writing since 1993, she lives in Wimberley.

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Late Empire (October 2017). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Hayden Carruth Award, a Lannan Literary Residency, an Essay Press chapbook prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Centrum, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she currently serves as a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

Join us for an evening with poets Bruce Bond, Yahia Lababidi, and Kurt Heinzelman. Bruce will be reading from his recently released collection, Sacrum.

Of Sacrum Rick Barot writes:

“‘The poet writes the history of his body,’ Thoreau once noted, and nothing could be truer of the work undertaken by Bruce Bond in Sacrum. Exploring the tender vulnerabilities of the body and the complicated processes of consciousness, these poems keep arriving at elegy by meditating on the vivacities that make a life: love and pain, knowledge and time, wonder and reality. All the while, as one poem’s speaker intones, ‘be one part miracle, another / blunder.’ In what is now a considerable body of work, Bond has been exploring that terrain between miracle and blunder in poems that get richer with each book. Sacrum is a superb and necessary addition to our poetry.”

Bruce Bond is the author of fifteen books. Presently he lives in Denton, Texas where he is Poetry Editor for American Literary Review and Regents Professor at the University of North Texas.

Egyptian-American thinker, poet and author of 7 books in 4 genres, Yahia Lababidi’s forthcoming book, Where Epics Fail, was featured on PBS NewsHour and is generously endorsed by Obama’s inaugural poet, Richard Blanco. Epics is to be published by Unbound(UK), in partnership with Penguin Random House and is currently available for pre-order. Prior to that, Lababidi’s Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems (1993-2015) debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases. His work has appeared on NPR, Best American Poetry, AGNI, World Literature Today, On Being with Krista Tippett and Lababidi has participated in international poetry festivals throughout the USA, Eastern Europe, as well as the Middle East. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his writing has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Slovak, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Swedish.

A native of Wisconsin, Kurt Heinzelman lived for a number of years in western Massachusetts. His work as a poet, scholar, and translator is widely published. He is also an editor, having co-founded two literary journals, The Poetry Miscellany and Bat City Review, and served as editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. He lives in Austin, Texas where he is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Texas and is a faculty member in the Michener Center for Writers.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Lyman Grant’s new poetry collection, Old Men on Tuesday Mornings (Alamo Bay Press). The book is dedicated to four other Austin men—John Lee, Bill Jeffers, David Jewell, and John McElhenney—and they will also be reading at the launch.

Looking back across the vista of time, these poems keep a watchful eye on the memory-wolves that stalk us with their hard truths and expired dreams. The deep consideration of the many selves we’ve been along the way drew me in and held me-each piece taking a facet of the lived life and holding it close before letting it go. The writing is lush with compassion, honesty, joy, acceptance, and above all, lyricism. —Charlotte Gullick, author of By Way of Water

Old Men on Tuesday Mornings features lyrical poetry on the process of aging and the transition from one life-stage to another, on the passing of time and its relentless impact on masculinity and the male image, and on on the place of the solitary individual in 21st Century America.

Lyman Grant worked at Austin Community College for 34 years as a professor of English, Creative Writing, and Humanities. He is the author and editor of several books, including five volumes of poetry. The most recent is Old Men on Tuesday Mornings, poems inspired in a men’s writing group with John Lee, David Jewell, Bill Jeffers, and John McElhenney.

John Lee is author of the best-selling book The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man and twenty-three others. He is a counselor, coach, and public speaker.

David Jewell is a Neo-DaDa would-be astronaut bohemian and sometimes writer type.

Bill Jeffers is a tall person, sculptor, very low key political opinion-holder, and occasional poet of sorts.

John McElhenney is a social media strategist, dad, and writer, and blogs at uber.la.

Join us for an after-hours reading featuring poets Mahogany Browne, Sam Sax, and Saretta Morgan, hosted by Carrie Fountain.

Cave Canem, Poets House, and Serenbe Focus alum Mahogany Browne (above left) is the author of several books including Redbone (nominated for NAACP Outstanding Literary Works) and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution and About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010. Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poet and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as a third of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada’s The Word and UK’s MOBO. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Manhattanville Review, Muzzle, Union Station Mag, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Joint, and The Feminist Wire. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Break Beat Poets: Black Girl Magic and the chapbook collection Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books). She is an Urban Word NYC Artistic Director (as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices), founder of Women Writers of Color Reading Room, Program Director of BLM@Pratt, and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. Browne is also the publisher of Penmanship Books, the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday Night Slam curator, and recent graduate from Pratt Institute’s MFA Writing & Activism program.

Sam Sax (above center) is the author of Madness (Penguin, 2017), winner of The National Poetry Series, and Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He’s received fellowships from the NEA, Lambda Literary, and the MacDowell Colony. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and his poems have appeared in BuzzFeed, the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Tin House and other journals. He’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press.

Saretta Morgan (above right) received a BA in writing from Columbia University and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tripwire, The Volta, Best American Experimental Writing and The Guardian among others. She has designed interactive, text-based experiences for The Whitney Museum of American Art, Dia Beacon, Tenri Cultural Institute, and as a 2016-2017 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace resident. She is author of the chapbooks Room for a Counter Interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017) and Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018).

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon.

Featured reader W. Joe Hoppe is a poet, mechanic, and professor of English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Galvanized (Dalton Publishing) and Diamond Plate (Obsolete Press). His poems have appeared in Borderlands, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy and Utter, and the Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. He was named Austin’s Best Mopar Poet for 2016 by the Austin Chronicle.

An open mic follows, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

Join us in celebrating the launch of two new books: Boyd Taylor’s Necessities, the fourth novel in the Donnie Ray Cuinn Series, and William Darling’s Anahuac, the second book in the Jim Ward series.

Boyd Taylor (above) is the author of four novels in the Donnie Ray Cuinn Series—Hero, The Antelope Play, The Monkey House, and his most recent work, Necessities (trailer here), which will be available to readers in November. Boyd, a graduate of the University of Texas and the UT Law School, has written fiction all his life. He was enrolled in Dr. Gerald Langford’s creative writing course at the University of Texas, who advised him to go to law school. He honed his fiction-writing skills as an attorney and later as an executive for a large chemical company, writing countless long-range business plans that required imagining the future in the form of scenarios, most of which never came to pass. Company assignments took Boyd and his family to locations as diverse as the Texas Panhandle, Appalachia, New England and the Texas Gulf Coast. He was able to travel the world on business. He learned from direct observation that however different people and places may seem, people everywhere face similar paradoxes of love and loss, life and death, and self-sacrifice and betrayal. Boyd lives with his wife in Austin, Texas.  He has committed to her to write a novel a year and to keep to his study and his trusty Underwood typewriter, out of harm’s way. Unbeknownst to her, he is now using a MaxBookPro. Boyd welcomes inquiries and comments from his readers, who may contact him at Antelopecity@icloud.com or on his Facebook page.

William D. Darling (above) is a lifelong storyteller and very nearly a native Texan, arriving in his beloved state as an infant in 1942. His first novel, Morgan’s Point, introduced readers to both the mid-‘60s rough-and-tumble world of the Houston courts where Darling came of age, and the Galveston Bay region that has long fascinated him. His latest novel Anahuac, serves as a sequel to Morgan’s Point as well as its own fascinating tale. Darling, who has lived within the legislative bustle of Washington, D.C. and in the beauty of a Central Texas ranch, currently resides in Austin, where he and his wife have built a longstanding law practice.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the graphic novel I, Parrot, by acclaimed author Deb Olin Unferth and with stunning illustrations by artist Elizabeth Haidle. Deb and Elizabeth will be interviewed by award-winning writer Mary Helen Specht.

When Daphne loses custody of her son, she is willing to do whatever it takes to get him back―even if it means enlisting the help of the wayward love of her life, a trio of housepainters, a flock of passenger pigeons, a landlady from hell, a super-sized bag of mite-killing powder, and more parrots than she knows what to do with. 

I, Parrot dips into the surreal with poignancy and humor. In this riveting, funny, and tragic graphic novel, Daphne must risk everything. Her quest is ultimately a tale about civilization’s decline, the heartbreak of extinction, and the redemption found in individual revolution.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of four books, including Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and Tin House. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Elizabeth Haidle is a freelance artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the creative director and regular contributor at Illustoria magazine, while writing and illustrating a nonfiction graphic novel series and raising her teenage son.

Mary Helen Specht’s first novel, Migratory Animals, was an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Austin American-Statesmen, an IndieNext Pick, and an Apple iBook selection. Migratory Animals also won the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Best Book of Fiction. A past Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University. Texas Monthly has named her one of “Ten Writers to Watch.”

Illustrations above by Elizabeth Haidle

Join us in celebrating the launch of Meg Freitag’s debut poetry collection, Edith. Meg will be joined by Taisia Kitaiskaia and Blake Lee Pate.

In a time when so much of our poetry seems ironic and detached, its language overwrought or restrained, its associations timid or excessively mentalized, it’s a true pleasure to encounter this fresh new voice, vibrant and full of the wild sap of life. And like Edith, chained to the sky. — Dorianne Laux

“No one is free” says Bob Dylan, “even the birds are chained to the sky.” Edith is a book about a bird, a beloved bird that dies an untimely death and is mourned accordingly. Edith is ethereal, part muse, part icon, part confidant, her name echoes through the poems in what Pound would call the “manner of the musical phrase”, the way the name Tarumba sounds through the work of the Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, or the name Naomi in Bill Knott’s first collection, repeats itself like a talisman.

Meg Freitag was born in Maine. She is the author of Edith (2017), selected by Dorianne Laux as winner of the 2016 BOAAT Book Prize. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, where she was a Michener Fellow. Her work can be found in Tin House, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals.

Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in Russia and raised in America. She is the author of Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, illustrated by Katy Horan. Her poetry has been published widely. Her most recent work is Ask Baba Yaga, a collection of “otherworldly advice for everyday troubles.” Taisia lives in Austin, Texas.

Blake Lee Pate received her MFA in poetry from the New Writer’s Project and currently teaches English at Austin Community College. She has poems in the Dead Animal Handbook Anthology, Spoon River Poetry Review, Glittermob magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.

Austin Writers Roulette is an 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 “Reinvented Past.” Featured artists are: HOPE RUIZ, POET KEN, MARIA CLARK, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows the featured artists line up. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Rob Jackson’s The Witness, a collection of meditations in the form of poems, stories, and straight talk on spirituality.

The Witness is a modern take on a classic genre of spiritual works pioneered by the likes of Kahlil Gibran. It dances between playful verses, elegant stories, and contemplative poems that are not only pleasing sensually, but a call for deeper contemplation of life. The Witness is sometimes human, sometimes plant, sometimes inanimate, but always present and always deepening in awareness of self—inviting the reader to join in the experience through meditative practices.

Rob Jackson is a free-spirited, big-hearted fellow whose life journey has taken him from professional MMA fighter and coach, to project and business manager in energy and biotech, to advisor for nonprofit boards, to facilitator of workshops and community organizer. Currently, Rob is working on his next book, as well as writing blogs and articles. Rob’s work is to embody the invitation to come and play and express oneself as authentically as they are able. In this way, he teaches others to unleash their best potential. He does this through his writings, group events, and one-on-one intuitive counseling.

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!

Performers include Siri, Ashley Nelcy García, Montserrat Madariaga, and Michael Reyes.

For twenty years, the Austin reading for the Texas Poetry Calendar has been the culmination of the fall calendar readings for Dos Gatos Press. This year’s reading will feature poets sharing Texas-related work, including their poems from the 2018 Texas Poetry Calendar (edited by Wade Martin, Allyson Whipple, and David Meischen).

Join us for an afternoon with Conor Bracken, Michael Parker, and Karen Davidson.

Conor Bracken’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Forklift OH, Muzzle Magazine, Love’s Executive Order, The New Yorker, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. His chapbook, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, will be published by Bull City Press in late 2017. A graduate of Virginia Tech, a former poetry editor for Gulf Coast, and the assistant director of a university writing center, he received his MFA from the University of Houston, in Houston, TX, where he and his wife currently live.

Michael Parker is the author of six novels—Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World—and two collections of stories, The Geographical Cure and Don’t Make Me Stop Now. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various journals including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The Southwest Review, Epoch, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, Shenandoah, The Black Warrior Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men’s Journal. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart, New Stories from the South and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, he is the Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and since 2009 has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.  He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina and Austin, Texas.

Karen Davidson is a writer and producer living in Austin, Texas. She was co-creator of the literary zine: Los Angeles, 1956, editor of Transfer Magazine, and contributing editor to the relaunch of American Short Fiction. She’s collaborated on film, music and literary projects with the Austin-based arts collective Monofonus Press, including the IF series and the four-part graphic novel Shadow Healer. She’s the recipient of two oral history grants from Texas Parks and Wildlife for projects aimed at incorporating more inclusive histories at the LBJ State Park. She wrote and produced ASSISTED LIVING, a short film forthcoming from Zilker Films in 2018, and is currently at work on a new short film which will be her directorial debut. Karen holds an MFA from UT Austin where she was a James A. Michener fellow in Screenwriting and Fiction.

Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon.

Featured reader John T. David, an Austin journalist and author, and Brent Douglass, an international businessman from Austin, collaborate with James R. Dennis, a former attorney turned Dominican friar who lives in San Antonio, under the name Miles Arceneaux; they have recently published Hidden Sea, the fifth in a series of thrillers set on the Gulf Coast.

An open mic follows, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.

Join us in celebrating the release of the Fall 2017 edition of Austin Community College’s journal, The Rio Review, which showcases poetry, prose, and artworks by students. During the event, students featured in this issue will share their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with us.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Ryan Sharp’s new chabook, my imaginary old man: poems (Finishing Line Press). With readings from Ryan, Joe Brundidge, and Jennine “DOC” Wright.

The poems in my imaginary old man: poems construct a world alive with the ordinary and the mysterious. There is a sustained music to these poems, a music that sings out through an imagined throat, a music that both cracks a bell and is heard as the screech of tires. I like who this imagined man is, and how his idiosyncrasies could belong to any of us. These poems act like a mirror held up to the world asking us to notice what’s real all around and to search for what matters.

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—Dorianne Laux, recipient of The Paterson Prize and author of The Book of Men

Ryan Sharp is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin where his research focuses on contemporary Black American persona poetry and the Archive. His poetry and reviews have appeared in several journals including Callaloo, Copper Nickel, and PANK. He lives with his wife and two children in Austin, TX, where he serves as the editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and as the Writers’ Studio Coordinator at Huston-Tillotson University.

Joe Brundidge has hosted a number of open mic events for almost 20 years, including Spoken & Heard at Kick Butt Coffee, an event he curates. He also served as the Director of the Austin International Poetry Festival for three years, from 2012-2015.

Jennine “DOC” Wright is a mother, writer, artivist and educator in Austin, Texas. She has competed in world, national, and local competitions. She holds four titles to include Killeen Poetry Slam that placed 2nd overall in the nation in 2012 and Neo Soul Poetry Slam placing 1st in group piece finals in 2013. Jennine was the 2015 season slam champ for Austin’s Neo Soul and was also the coach for Austin Poetry Slam’s 2016 national team. She teaches English at Huston-Tillotson University while mentoring for the Speak Piece Poetry Project, a youth performance poetry program. She is currently wiring a musical and is also an MFA poetry student at Spalding University.

Austin Writers Roulette is an 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 “Festivus Miracles.” ’Tis the season to get your Scrooge on, get into the holiday spirit, and everything humorous, miraculous, and serious in between. So, HO, HO, HO and BAH HUMBUG to you all during the open mic, following the featured artists! Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us in celebrating the launch of David Taylor’s third collection of poetry, Palm Up, Palm Down (Wings Press). With readings from David, Jim LaVilla-Havelin, and Bryce Milligan.

Palm Up, Palm Down draws on connections and commitments to home and place—human and nonhuman. Such a topic is not new to poetry; however, this book moves in circles, out and away, then returns home, rediscovering the quiet beyond/within the concept of “home.” The collection moves readers to slow not only their reading but encourages them to slow down the pace of their lives, allowing time to inhabit, listen, and invite in the broad array of neighbors.

David Taylor’s lyrical meditation on walking rhythmically through this world and noticing gleaming details with each footstep offers a reprieve from the blows of city life and the daily injustices on our streets. This book is a refuge. The poems are feather-light with the packed-in wisdom of old river stones. They know the currents. They do not move. What moves is the spirit in the dynamic lines of Taylor’s work. Whether we are circling the lake with the poet, or dancing to Havana’s rhythms, this poetry provides real company, partnership. —Marilyn Kallet, author of The Love That Moves Me

David Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability at Stony Brook University. His writing crosses disciplinary boundaries and genres—creative nonfiction, poetry, scholarship and science/technical writing; however, at the core of his work always is the concern for sustainability and community. One of his current projects is “The People’s Art and Modernism: Woody Guthrie, Joseph Campbell and Miguelito Valdés in New York in the 1940s.” Woody Guthrie’s writing (e.g. Bound for Glory) and music, Joseph Campbell’s interest in an ecology of folk mythologies, and the rise of popular Latin, esp. Afrocuban, music, for example, by Miguelito Valdés (or “Mr. Babalu”), function as windows into a time and place that allowed diverse interactions and legacies in the arts that still resonate today. Natural history writing and creative nonfiction include Lawson’s Fork: Headwaters to the Confluence (Hub City Press, 2000), a personal narrative on the history and natural history of Lawson’s Fork, Spartanburg’s local river. He edited an anthology, Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing (UNT Press, 2006). Steve Wolverton and he co-edited and contributed to a collection of essays about an interdisciplinary project on Mesa Verde archaeological sites and their representations to the public, titled Sushi in Cortez: Essays from the Edge of Academia (University of Utah Press, 2015). Taylor is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Praying Up the Sun (Pecan Grove Press, 2008) and The Log from The Sea of Cortez: A Poem Series (Wings Press, 2014).

Jim LaVilla-Havelin (above) is a poet, educator, and arts administrator. He is the author of four previous books of poems—Rites of Passage (Charon Press 1968), What the Diamond Does Is Hold It All In (White Pine Press 1978), Simon’s Masterpiece (White Pine Press 1983), and most recently, Counting (Pecan Grove Press, 2010). LaVilla-Havelin’s poems have appeared in the Texas Observer and other journals; in the anthologies Is This Forever, Or What? and Between Heaven & Texas; and in the Texas Poetry Calendar (and in Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair, the Dos Gatos Press anthology from the Texas Poetry Calendar). He was the Director of the Young Artist Programs at the Southwest School of Art for seventeen years, retiring in May 2013 to teach, write and consult. LaVilla-Havelin’s essays and criticism have appeared in Ceramics Monthly, Ceramics: Art & Perception, and Surface Design Journal, and exhibition catalogues of Danville Chadbourne and Rex Hausmann. He is editing a collection of poetry and visual art about sport, entitled Levelling the Playing Field, and is working on a book-length poem about jazz, Playlist. LaVilla-Havelin is the Coordinator of National Poetry Month events in San Antonio, and the Poetry Editor for the San Antonio Express-News. He has taught, read, offered workshops, presentations, and teacher trainings throughout the Northeast, Ohio, and Texas. A twenty-two year Texan, LaVilla-Havelin lives with his wife, the artist Lucia LaVilla-Havelin, in Lytle, Texas.

Bryce Milligan (above) is an author working in numerous genres, from children’s books to novels for young adults, to adult poetry and criticism. Bloomsbury Review once called him a “literary wizard.” Critic Paul Christensen wrote of Milligan as “one of the principal writers of the region and a force at the center of the literary art movements of Texas.” Milligan was the book columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and the San Antonio Light throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN American Center, and the Texas Institute of Letters, his reviews and essays appeared in many journals and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, et al. The founding editor of Pax: A Journal for Peace through Culture (1983-1987) and (with Roberto Bonazzi) Vortex: A Critical Review (1986-1990), he directed the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s literature program and its San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair and Latina Letters conferences for several years. Milligan has been the publisher, editor and book designer of Wings Press since 1995. Wings Press has been profiled in numerous publications, including Poets & Writers Magazine and the Huffington Post. Milligan was the primary editor of Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (Riverhead, 1995)—which was the first all-Latina anthology to be published by a major American publishing house—and Floricanto Si: A Collection of Latina Poetry (Penguin, 1998). He has edited several smaller anthologies and critical collections, and designed numerous books for other presses. Milligan is the author of four historical novels and short story collections for young adults. With the Wind, Kevin Dolan (1987) received the Texas Library Association’s Lone Star Book Award. One of his children’s books, Brigid’s Cloak, was a 2002 “Best of the Year” pick by both the Bank Street College and Publishers Weekly. Some of his gallery theater pieces have been produced weekly at the Witte Museum in San Antonio for over 25 years. Milligan is also the author of six previous collections of poetry. His poetry and his song lyrics have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Southwest Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Clover, and Texas Observer, among others. Once upon a time, he was a working luthier and a singer/songwriter (twice a semi-finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folks songwriting competition). He has taught English and creative writing at every level, including workshops from California to Prague. Milligan is a recipient of the Gemini Ink “Award for Literary Excellence” and the St. Mary’s University President’s Peace Commission’s “Art of Peace Award” for “creating work that enhances human understanding through the arts.”

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 we have three wonderful authors: Nancy Smith, Linda Hanna Lloyd, and Christy Esmahan.

Nancy Smith is a freelance writer of novels (The Universal Vaccine, The Slow Kill, Tainted Harvest), screenplays, and short stories. She is also a filmmaker, script analyst, and script supervisor. Nancy is the owner of First Look Script Analysis, operating since December 2005, and First Look Publishing operating since 2016. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Linda Hanna Lloyd’s debut novel, The Syrian Peddler, was inspired her grandfather, Sam Hanna’s immigration to America. Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania to parents of Syrian and Irish descent, Linda spent three years researching her grandfather’s story, driving through Pennsylvania to visit, Uniontown, Masontown, Brownsville, and the Coal and Coke Heritage Center on the Fayette County, Penn State campus. Then by train to New York City to Ellis Island, where she found the registry of Sam’s steamship and imagined his thoughts as he entered the New York Harbor. A graduate of The Pennsylvania State University with a Master’s Degree in Education, Linda was the producer and host of a monthly Maryland Cable Television Health Promotion Series, nine of which won national awards. She is the recipient of two Creative Writing Awards from The Institute of Creative Research. Linda was a health professor at Howard Community College in Columbia Maryland where she received an International Community College Teaching Excellence Award, from The National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, The University of Texas at Austin. She retired from the United States Department of Health and Human Services where her work focused on improving the quality of health care and health literacy. Linda resides in Austin, Texas with her husband. In her spare time, Linda continues writing, volunteers for the People’s Community Clinic, is a member of the Writer’s League of Texas, and participates in Chamber Music Workshops.

Christy Esmahan is an award-winning novelist who is passionate about the environment. Her novels are primarily about climate change, the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans and social justice. Esmahan began her career as a scientist, earning her BA in Microbiology at Miami University and her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Universidad de Leon, Spain. She lived in Houston for sixteen years and moved to Austin about two years ago. When she’s not writing, she works as a professional translator and she loves to go birding with her husband.

Join us for an evening with visiting poet Anton Yakovlev. With readings from Anton, plus special guests Heather Tone and James Arthur (left to right, below).

Born in Moscow, Russia, Anton Yakovlev studied filmmaking and poetry at Harvard University. His latest poetry collection is Ordinary Impalers (Aldrich Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Prelude, Measure, and elsewhere. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Esenin, is forthcoming from Sensitive Skin Books in 2017. He has also written and directed several short films.

Heather Tone is the recipient of the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for her collection Likenesses (Copper Canyon Press). She is also the author of a chapbook, Gestures (The Catenary Press). Her poetry has appeared in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Fence, and other journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now lives in Austin.

James Arthur was born in Connecticut and grew up in Toronto. His first book, Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press. His poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, and a Fulbright Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Northern Ireland. Arthur lives in Baltimore and teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva. This event will feature readings and discussion from the translator, Jamey Gambrell.

Jamey Gambrell’s excellently translated edition with its well-researched and informative introduction graciously fulfils Tsvetaeva’s desire to see these pieces of diaristic prose bound in a single volume. —Rachel Polonsky, The Times Literary Supplement

Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters, find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life.

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. She has translated works by Tsvetaeva and Tatyana Tolstaya, in addition to Vladimir Sorokin’s three-volume Ice trilogy and his Day of the Oprichnik and The Blizzard. This spring, the one-man show “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” premiered, featuring her translated surtitles of Joseph Brodsky’s poetry. Gambrell was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, which recognizes “a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.”

Join us for an afternoon with Coco Picard, Devin King, Anthony Madrid, Nadya Pittendrigh, and Julia Hendrickson. We’ll be celebrating the release earlier this year of Coco’s graphic novel The Chronicles of Fortune.

The Chronicles Of Fortune stands as a confirmation of the misfit’s path in life. Not only is it okay to be different, it’s okay to look like a failure in the eyes of others. Who cares? Just you, you’re the only one who needs to care. And are you happy? That seems to be what Picard is asking. —Comics Beats

Originally published as a series of mini-comics, The Chronicles of Fortune follows the lives of Fortuna, and her alter-ego, Edith-May, as they learn to cope with loss, recruiting a team of friends along the way. Discover a temperamental stove, a nosy mountain, a goofy crocodile, a loner moth, and a singing goldfish as they lead Fortuna on her greatest adventure. At once charming, sad, funny, poignant, and bizarre, The Chronicles of Fortune keeps one foot in mundane reality.

Coco Picard (above) is a writer, publisher, and curator. She is the Executive Director of The Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005—and the Co-Director of Sector 2337, a hybrid artspace/bar/bookstore in Chicago. Her critical writing appears under the name Caroline Picard in publications like ArtForum (critics picks), art21, Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, and The Seen. A recent essay about the cats of James Joyce, Marcel Broodthaers, Derrida, the Walker Art Center, and Art Orienté object, The Strangers Among Us, was released in chapbook-form by Astrophil Press in 2017. Fiction and comics have appeared in Hyperallergic, The Coming Envelope (Book Thug), Necessary Fiction, Tupelo Quarterly, Everyday Genius and she has two contributions in vols 1 + 3 of The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press). TSK, a novel inspired by the ghost of Joseph Beuys, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in 2019.

Devin King is the co-director of Sector 2337 and the poetry editor for the Green Lantern Press. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. His second book, just out from Canarium (February 2017), is called Try Never.

Nadya Pittendrigh teaches writing at the University of Houston–Victoria.

Julia V. Hendrickson is a curator, writer, and editor, and the Associate Curator at The Contemporary Austin.

Join us for a poetry reading and birthday cake to celebrate the late, great poet laureate of Hyde Park, Albert Huffstickler. With M.C. W. Joe Hoppe, and featuring readings from David Jewell, Sylvia Manning, David Thornberry, and Larry Thoren. Plus, get a free copy of Huff’s book, Walking Wounded, with every purchase on December 17th!

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

You’re invited to join us for the fourth Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s readers are Peg Alford Pursell, Butch Hancock, Ken Waldman, and Justin Booth (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.

Peg Alford Pursell is a writer, editor, teacher, literary community builder, and all-around good egg. She is the author of SHOW HER A FLOWER, A BIRD, A SHADOW (ELJ Editions, March 2017), second edition forthcoming September 8, 2017. Peg lives in Northern California and directs Why There Are Words, a national neighborhood of literary readings she founded in Sausalito in 2010. She is the director and founder of WTAW Press, an independent publisher of literary books. Peg also founded North Bay Writers Workshops. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

As a member of the groundbreaking Flatlanders, singer/songwriter Butch Hancock helped kick-start the progressive country movement of the ’70s. As a solo artist, Hancock recorded a series of country-folk albums for his own independent Rainlight label, which showcased his literate wordplay, quirky humor, and dry, vocal Dylan-esque delivery. Going the independent route certainly cost Hancock some name recognition and wider exposure, but he did earn a devoted cult following, especially in his native Texas. Butch’s most recent of fourteen CDs is War and Peace.

Ken Waldman has drawn on his 30 years in Alaska to produce poems, stories, and fiddle tunes that combine into a performance uniquely his. Nine CDs mix Appalachian-style string-band music with original poetry. Eight books include six poetry collections, a memoir, and a children’s book. Since 1995 he’s toured full-time, performing at the nation’s leading festivals and clubs. His most recent books are the memoir, Are You Famous? (Catalyst Book Press, 2008), which chronicles Waldman’s adventures on tour throughout the United States, and D is for Dog Team (Nomadic Press, 2009), a sequence of Alaska-set acrostic poems for young readers.

Justin Booth, originally from Black Oak, Arkansas, is an Austin, Texas writer of outlaw poetry, of questionable stories, and outright lies. His five books of poetry are Outlaw Blue (2016), The Singer, The Lesbian, & The One with the Feet: 69 Bipolar Love Poems (2015), A quarter, a Dime, and Two Copper Pennies (2015), Trailer Park Troubadour—Strung Out on Heartache (2013), and Lucky Strikes, Grave Dirt, and 1/3 of the Stars (2016).

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 we have two wonderful authors—Rob Reynolds and REYoung—and we’ll be celebrating the recent launch of Rob’s new novel, Wire Mother Monkey Baby.

Rob Reynolds’ stories have appeared in the Tampa Review, Kennesaw Review (online), Mad Hatter’s Review, flashquake, Vestal Review, and Eunoia Review, and have been honored by the Austin Chronicle. “What You Can Learn in a Bar” was anthologized in You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories. He’s a former contributing associate and contributing editor of the Harvard Review and the Boston Book Review. In what seems like a previous life, he taught English for four years at Tom Petty’s alma mater, Gainesville High School in Florida. He’s lived in Austin since 1994, and is a big fan of cats, dogs, and children. Well, most of them.

REYoung was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and lives in Austin, Texas, in a limestone cave deep beneath the city. He is the author of the novels Unbabbling (Dalkey Archive Press, 1997) and Margarito and the Snowman (also DAP, 2016).

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is poet, playwright, and activist Nikki Luellen.

Nikki Luellen is a poet, playwright, and activist from Houston, Texas. In the past year, she has been writing and performing poems inspired by her active involvement with families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality and by her work with the group Refuse Fascism.

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.

Austin Writers Roulette is an 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 “Shock of a New Beginning.” Featured artists are BRENNAN UTLEY, RYAN GOSSEN, HOPE RUIZ, AUDREY BRAZEEL, URSULA PIKE, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows after intermission. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review! Readers will include E. Kristin Anderson, J. Scott Brownlee, Nick Courtright, Jonathan Moody, and Sasha West.

Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review is a literary journal based in Austin, Texas that publishes poetry along with photographs, reviews, and essays. Since its debut in 1992, Borderlands continues to receive wide critical acclaim and garners a national readership.

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Prince fan, Starbucks connoisseur and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including We’re Doing Witchcraft; Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night; and 17 seventeen XVII. Kristin is an editor at Red Paint Hill and once upon a time worked at The New Yorker.

J. Scott Brownlee is a poet-of-place from Llano, Texas. His books include Highway or Belief (Button Poetry), Ascension (Texas Review Press), Requiem for Used Ignition Cap (Orison Books), which won the 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County (Tree Light Books).

Nick Courtright 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. He is co-executive editor and book designer for Gold Wake Press, and the founder and executive editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Boston Review, among many others. His son, William, can usually be found reading a book or surrounded by Lego bricks.

Join us for an evening with poets Jenny Johnson, Shangyang Fang, and Travis Tate.

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet, published by Sarabande Books in 2017. Her honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. After earning a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in San Francisco, and she spent ten summers on the staff of the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She is a Contributing Editor at Waxwing Literary Journal. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.

Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China. He majored in Civil Engineering as an undergrad. After knowing there is a higher employment rate in the field of poetry, he decided to pursue an MFA. He writes both in English and Chinese. Sometimes he writes poems first in Chinese to structure their skeletons, then translate them into English to add flesh and blood. He is now a poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.

travis tate is a queer black playwright, poet and performer from Austin, Texas. Their poetry has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Underblong and Mr. Ma’am, among other publications. Their one-person drag show, It’s a Travesty! One Night with Jazzie Mercado!, was presented at the 2017 Cohen New Work Festival and at Salvage Vanguard’s Three Headed Fest in November 2017. Their play MotherWitch will be presented in the University of Texas New Theatre presentation in April 2018.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the second 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. Numerous poets and writers will read excerpts of their work from this edition, including Gloria Amescua, Catherine Castoro, Karen Collier, Marilyn Duncan, Gayle Guernsey, Stephen Hamilton, Lindsey Lane, and Allyson Whipple.

Join us in celebrating the release of John Vanderslice’s historical novel, The Last Days of Oscar Wilde. With readings from John Vanderslice and Lucas Schaefer.

Oscar Wilde is struggling through his final years in Paris. His reputation is ruined. His finances are in shambles. He drinks too much. He is reduced to begging meals from strangers; he even resorts to minor fraud to raise a few more pounds to live on. The most important romantic relationship of his life, his alliance with Lord Alfred Douglas, is now but a strained, overwrought friendship marked on both sides by resentments and guilt. And yet against this backdrop of poverty, social downfall, and disappearing fortitude, Oscar Wilde survives. While his sense of self has been rent, he maintains his humor, an active joie de vivre, an affection for superstitious religiosity, and a network of devoted friends. He even manages to fall in love again. But can his close circle of devoted friends convince him to pick up his pen one more time and write?

John Vanderslice teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Central Arkansas. His stories, poems, essays, and one-act plays have appeared in scores of literary journals, including Laurel Review, Seattle Review, South Carolina Review, and Crazyhorse. His linked booked of stories Island Fog (Lavender Ink Press) was named by Library Journal as one of the Top 15 Indie Fiction Titles of 2014. His historical novel The Last Days of Oscar Wilde has just been released by Burlesque Press. 

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 Emilee Araujo, an aspiring screenwriter and Creative Writing major at ACC. She has served as an editor of the Rio Review, and has been published there.

Austin Writers Roulette is an 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 “Talk Dirty to Me.” Readers include: NICOLE CORTICHIATO, R.G. HOOK, GUME LAUREL III, 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 for an evening with acclaimed poet Carl Phillips. We’ll be celebrating the recent release of his new collection, Wild Is the Wind. This event is sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers.

In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past’s capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love’s fallout. How “to say no to despair”? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips’s remarkable work, stand as further proof that “if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft.” —Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review

Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018). His collection The Rest of Love (FSG, 2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other books include Rock Harbor (FSG, 2002); The Tether (FSG, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Carl Phillips is a visiting poet at the Michener Center for a one week residency this semester.

Join us for something rather special: Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department will be introducing us to the two winners of their 2016 Balcones Prize: fiction winner Tara Laskowski (left, below) and poetry winner Jacqueline Allen Trimble (right, below).

Tara Laskowski is also the author of the flash fiction collection Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons, tales of dark etiquette. Her fiction has been published in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Best Small Fictions, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mid-American Review, and other places. She won the grand prize for the 2010 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Series. Tara earned a BA in English with a minor in writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Since 2010, she has been the editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly.

American Happiness is Jacqueline Allen Trimble’s first book. A professor of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, she has published in The Griot, The Offing and The Blue Lake Review; she was a Cave Canem fellow and recipient of a literary arts fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2017.

This month’s three featured readers are from the Speak Piece Poetry Project, a collective of artists committed to developing the language, comprehension, and presentation skills of youth in central Texas through competitive spoken word poetry. The organization also provides a safe space for youth in central Texas to express themselves freely, and promotes the artistic and leadership talents of young people as they engage with their community.

Sheenika Medard is a first-generation West-Indian American poet, performer, educator and organizer. After competing at Brave New Voices 2010 with the Austin TheySpeak youth team, she was inspired to spread the art of spoken word and slam as a viable platform for both literacy and as a tool of change. She has since begun programs in her home country of St. Lucia, and has appeared on several stages across the world. She recently participated in the Youth Speaks Future Corps Fellowship and launched the #FirstGenWoes and #SpeakWithoutCage initiatives. She intends to use her work in different mediums to further level the playing field for women, ethnic groups and the youth. She firmly believes that recording our stories in history is leaving a road for future generations to follow and by openly discovering and expressing our truth, we leave a framework behind for others to do the same. She is excited and honored to be a part of this team and cannot wait to begin the work of building opportunities for the youth to speak up!

Christina Romero is a teacher, a performer, and a life-long learner. She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BFA in Theater Education and has spent the subsequent years establishing her approach to teaching literacy through the arts. While teaching Performing Arts in Beijing, Christina performed regularly at Spittoon Poetry’s monthly meetings and spearheaded their budding Slam Poetry events. She is an Austin Poetry Slam champion and participated in the 2017 Women of the World poetry slam qualifier. She believes that the marriage between written expression and performance is crucial in developing self-awareness, strong communication skills, and leadership. It is her hope to cultivate a learning environment that is safe, challenging, and inspiring in order to bring meaningful change through storytelling and community engagement. She currently teaches English Language Arts to grades 5-7.

Breana Miller is a black female youth poet. She is an Austin native. She began writing at the age of 11 and performing at the age of 12. She has been a part of the youth slam scene for about six years and is now working on transitioning into being a teaching artist to help bring about the next generation of youth poets. Writing was the driving force of her self-discovery as a black queer woman, but poetry has been her main tool for seeking and providing inspiration for those whose voices are not heard. She is a psychology major at Texas State University with hopes of becoming a licensed psychologist and plans to use creative writing as a means to treat clients who suffer from traumas and other disabilities. Storytelling is one of the few things Breana claims to be a specialist in. She lives by the words of one of her favorite poets, Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless literary universe! Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month we have something rather special: our curmudgeon-in-chief Dr. Joe will interview Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha, hosts of our ever-so-popular I Scream Social monthly reading series. I Scream Social features women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond)… as well as, as the name would suggest, free locally crafted ice cream. The series debuted in June 2015 and was initially intended to run for the summer, but proved such a hit that it’s now a permanent monthly fixture—and Annar and Schandra are editing an anthology of writing from the Scream, due for publication Fall 2018.

Annar Veröld is a Honduran-American poet, screenwriter, and artist based out of Austin, Texas. She proudly co-curates the monthly feminist reading series I Scream Social, and is currently writing and directing a post-apocalyptic comedic tragedy short film titled Ophelia, In Between.

Schandra Abigail Madha is a chronic student, cross-genre writer on hiatus, and one half of a double scoop co-host sundae for the monthly I Scream Social feminist reading series. She earned a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin in 2015, during which time she was awarded the Fania Kruger Fellowship for Fiction of Social Vision and was a finalist for the Regents’ Outstanding Arts & Humanities Award in Poetry. She is currently back at UT pursuing a BS in Microbiology with an eye towards a graduate degree in Astrobiology.

Join us for an afternoon with poets David Cavanagh, Sharon Webster, and Steven Ray Smith (left to right, below).

David Cavanagh often writes poems about borders—not just physical borders but borderlands in the mind and heart. His most recent book of poems is Straddle, from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been supported by grants from the Vermont Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Sharon Webster is a poet and a visual artist in Burlington, Vermont. Her book, Everyone Lives Here, was published by Fomite Press in 2014. Webster’s mixed media work has been described as “images of the world as seen from within.” That could be a good description of her poems too.

Steven Ray Smith’s poetry has appeared in Slice, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, New Madrid, Tar River Poetry, Puerto del Sol, THINK and others. New work is forthcoming in Clarion. He lives in Austin.

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 David Thornberry.

David Thornberry is a painter and poet, alternating between the two art forms. He continues to make, publish and show art, both literary and visual, in the Austin area. His 30th chapbook, Too Soon, is scheduled to be published in March.

Join us for a reading from poets Heather Tone, Grace Ortman, and Joanna Kaminski (left to right, below).

Heather Tone is the recipient of the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for her collection Likenesses (Copper Canyon Press). She is also the author of a chapbook, Gestures (The Catenary Press). Her poetry has appeared in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Fence, and other journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now lives in Austin.

Grace Ortman writes poems, lyrical essays, the occasional homily, and short short stories. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and has published poems in publications such as Octopus Magazine, Play/No Play, The Concher, and Copper Nickel. She teaches Creative Writing, English, and Comparative Religion courses at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School here in Austin, Texas.

Joanna I. Kaminski received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Privacy Policy: An Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, among other places. She has an upcoming publication in The Southern Review. Joanna works at UT and runs a monthly-ish poetry bookclub that you should ask her about.

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 focuses on historical fiction, with writers Sandra Fox Murphy and J. Michael Dolan. Sandra will read from That Beautiful Season, a novel set just after the civil war, and Michael will read from The Trumpets of Jericho: A Tale of the Holocaust.

Sandra Fox Murphy is the author of two historical fiction novels, A Thousand Stars and That Beautiful Season. Her award-winning paranormal short story “Passage,” was recently published, and she is currently working on the Fidelia McCord series about a family of pioneers on its way to central Texas.

As a child J. Michael Dolan happened upon the iconic I Cannot Forgive by Rudolf Vrba, thus beginning a lifelong interest in the Holocaust. A wanderer for most of his adulthood, he’s lived in a lot of places, some of them exotic, where he combined the education only travel can give with that of the written word to produce a variety of published short stories and articles. For reasons that continue to elude him, however, he never thought of writing about the Holocaust. Until, upon revisiting a remarkable piece of history he’d all but forgotten, and finding to his surprise it still lacked the book it deserved, he decided to write that book. The result is his ambitious The Trumpets of Jericho, the only novel to tackle the defiant 1944 Jewish armed uprising at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, and its just as heroic aftermath.

In the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice, emerging and established writers talk with host Chaitali Sen about the power of words and the role of art in reflecting and changing our world.

This month’s guest is scientist and author Juli Berwald.

Marine invertebrates stole Juli Berwald’s heart on her first snorkel in the Red Sea during college. Hoping to study the ocean forever, she spent seven years building mathematical algorithms to interpret satellite imagery of the ocean, receiving her Ph.D. in ocean science. Her husband stole her heart next, and she drifted away from the ocean to Austin, Texas to be with him. Landlocked, she wrote textbooks and popular science articles for National Geographic, the New York Times, Nature, and Redbook before the story of jellyfish led her back to the sea. Her science memoir, Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, is “a heartfelt plea for humans to fulfill their responsibilities toward nature” (The New Yorker).

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.

Austin Writers Roulette is an 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 “Like Night & Day”—what happens when a situation goes sideways? Featured artists include LIABLEWRITER, KATHY REEVES, HOPE RUIZ, BRENNAN UTLEY, ARALYN HUGHES, HELEN BUCK, TERESA Y ROBERSON and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

You’re invited to join us for the fifth Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s readers are Brittani Sonnenberg, Steve Brooks, Domingo Martinez, and Kendra Tanacea (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.

Raised across three continents, Brittani Sonnenberg is a freelance journalist and creative writer based in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in The O’Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, The Guardian, NPR, and elsewhere. Her novel, Home Leave, was selected as a New York Times’ Editor’s Choice. She serves as a visiting lecturer and thesis adviser for Hong Kong University’s MFA Program.

Cross two famous guys named Brooks—Garth and Mel—and you get Austin folksinger Steve Brooks. A classic Texas troubadour who mixes storytelling, humor, heartbreak and cracker-barrel philosophy, his songs have been recorded by more than a dozen Americana artists, like Slaid Cleaves, Christine Albert and Russell Crowe. He wrote a song-a-week for Jim Hightower’s nationally-syndicated radio show and reigned as six-time World Pun Champion. He’s also spoken on spiritual topics at more than 40 Unitarian churches around the country. 

Domingo Martinez is the New York Times Best Selling author of The Boy Kings of Texas and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 2012. The Boy Kings of Texas is a Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award, a Non-Fiction Finalist for The Washington State Book Awards, and was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize. The Boy Kings of Texas was optioned for an HBO series through Salma Hayek’s production company, Ventana Rosa. His work has appeared in Epiphany Literary Journal, Seattle Weekly, Texas Monthly, The New Republic, Saveur Magazine, Huisache Literary Magazine and he is a regular contributor to This American Life.

Kendra Tanacea holds an MFA from Bennington College, where she completed her first poetry collection. A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees was a finalist for the Idaho Prize for Poetry and published by Lost Horse Press. Kendra’s poems have appeared in 5AM, Rattle, Poet Lore, and North American Review, among others. She has a BA in English from Wellesley College.

Join us for a reading from members of St. Edward’s University’s Literature, Writing and Rhetoric department. With readings from Alan Altimont, Amy Clements, Mary Helen Specht, Sasha West, and Michael Yang (left to right, below).

Alan Altimont has been translating the largely neglected Latin poetry of Marbod of Rennes (1035-1123 CE), the only early medieval European to write poems about himself, his sexuality, aesthetic experience, and the writing of poetry. He is an associate professor of English at St. Edward’s University, where he has taught various literature, creative writing, and composition courses for more than thirty years.

A native Austinite, Amy Clements teaches at St. Edward’s University and earned an MFA in creative writing at The New School in New York City. Her short fiction has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and The South Carolina Review. She is currently working on a novel titled The Darkest Skies in North America.

Mary Helen Specht’s debut novel, Migratory Animals, was an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Austin American-Statesmen, an IndieNext Pick, and an Apple iBook selection. Migratory Animals also won the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Best Book of Fiction. A previous Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University. Texas Monthly has named her one of “Ten Writers to Watch.”

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

Michael Yang’s stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Boulevard, The Seattle Review, and other publications. He is currently working on a book of short stories and a novel.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless literary universe! Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month our curmudgeon-in-chief Dr. Joe will interview award-winning poet, literary  translator, essayist, and journalist Liliana Valenzuela.

Liliana Valenzuela’s bilingual poetry chapbook Codex of Journeys: Bendito camino was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2012. Valenzuela is the acclaimed Spanish language translator of works by Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Nina Marie Martínez, Ana Castillo, Dagoberto Gilb, Richard Rodríguez, Rudolfo Anaya, Cristina García, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many other writers. Her translation of Sandra Cisneros’ A House of My Own was published in 2016. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and an inaugural fellow of CantoMundo, she works for ¡Ahora Sí!, the Spanish weekly of the Austin American-Statesman.

Join us in celebrating the launch of new books from Charles Alexander and Saba Syed Razvi. With readings from Charles, Saba, and Kyle Schlesinger (left to right, below).

Charles Alexander writes poems, publishes books, makes books, teaches poetry and other literary works. He has published 6 full books of poems and 13 chapbooks. He has been engaged for some two decades on the work Pushing Water, whose first volume was published by Cuneiform Press. The second volume, titled AT the Edge OF the Sea: Pushing Water II, has just been released by Singing Horse Press in San Diego. Alexander directs Chax Press, and has been a director and principle in many poetry community-building endeavors, including POG, Inc., in Tucson, Arizona, and currently as the co-curator of the University of Houston-Victoria Center for the Arts and the director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is most closely identified with Tucson, Arizona, where he and Chax Press spent approximately 30 years and to where he will return in Summer 2018. A collection of his essays on poetry and books will be published in 2019. He co-creates a variety of works and projects with his partner, the visual artist Cynthia Miller.

Saba Syed Razvi is the author of In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions), heliophobia (Finishing Line Press), Limerence & Lux (Chax Press), Of the Divining and the Dead (Finishing Line Press), and Beside the Muezzin’s Call & Beyond the Harem’s Veil (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Offending Adam, Diner, TheTHE Poetry Blog’s Infoxicated Corner, The Homestead Review, NonBinary Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, and others, as well as in anthologies such as Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, The Loudest Voice Anthology, The Liddell Book of Poetry, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, The Rhysling Anthology, Dreamspinning, and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace. Her poems have been nominated for the Elgin Award, the Bettering American Poetry Awards, The Best of the Net Award, the Rhysling Award, and have won a 2015 Independent Best American Poetry Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX, where in addition to working on scholarly research on interfaces between Science and contemporary Poetry, she is researching Sufi Poetry in translation, and writing new poems and fiction.

Kyle Schlesinger is a poet living in Austin. Some recent and forthcoming poetry books include: Sydney Omarr’s Wild Children, with the artist Flynn Maria Bergmann; Swish Void, with poet Grant Cross; and Life, with poet Ted Greenwald.

Join us for a reading with Montreux Rotholtz, Sid Miller, Katy Chrisler, and Stephanie Goehring. We’ll be celebrating the 2017 release of Montreux Rotholtz’s collection Unmark, selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the 2015 Burnside Review Press Book Award.

‘To mark’ means many things: to stain, to sign, to correct, to celebrate. Montreux Rotholtz’s Unmark ambitiously means much more, performing and undoing those acts, correcting definitions, understandings, and then unraveling those corrections in a headlong, fearless drive toward what is ‘just.’ These poems leave only what ‘claw[s] to remain’—and astonish with the lushness inside that leanness, where ‘the hot cloud [is] slung/around us,’ and the ‘pale green coronas’ of ‘lit sea-lanterns’ ‘fill the space.’ Lyric traditions—confession, fable, love poem, elegy, fugue, prayer—ghost through these constantly inventive poems and let us hear the strangeness of language, its overabundance and partialness, the way it both dissociates and connects. The beautiful, sensual intensity of these poems is haunted, assured: each one leans toward us, ‘feeling/for [our] fragile pressures,’ to ‘clarify [our] ear.’ —Mary Szybist

Montreux Rotholtz is the author of Unmark (Burnside Review Press, 2017), which was selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the Burnside Review Press Book Award. Her poems appear in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Prelude, jubilat, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.

Sid Miller lives in Vancouver, Washington with his wife and identical twin 6 year old boys. He is the owner of The Triple Lindy, a neighborhood bar in NW Portland, the author of three full length books of poetry, and is the founder and editor of Burnside Review Press.

Katy Chrisler received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held residencies with the Land Arts of the American West and 100 West Corsicana. Recent work of hers has appeared in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, The Volta, and The Seattle Review. Her chapbook, If It Be A Skeleton, will be out this summer from Walls Divide Press. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Stephanie Goehring is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including This Room Has a Ghost (dancing girl press). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she works as a bookseller at Malvern Books and a freelance copy editor. She also serves on the advisory council for Conflict of Interest.

We’re thrilled to be hosting a series of readings as part of the 26th annual Austin International Poetry Festival.

See the Austin International Poetry Festival website to sign up and for the full schedule of readings.

AIPF takes place April 5-8 and includes unique Austin venues, diverse themed poetry readings, open mics, workshops, music and poetry, anthology reading, dusk to dawn, and a poetry symposium. AIPF is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

Join us for an evening devoted to discussion of Claudia Rankine’s award-winning poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric, a powerful and direct engagement with race and violence in present-day American culture. We’ll also be discussing the cultural significance of the film Black Panther, and pose questions to the audience about the world as seen through the book and the movie. With host Joe Brundidge and guests Daria Howard and Kelene Blake-Fallon.

Joe Brundidge is an author and public speaker, and has hosted a number of open mic events for almost 20 years, including Spoken & Heard at Kick Butt Coffee, an event he curates. He also served as the Director of the Austin International Poetry Festival for three years, from 2012-2015. He is currently co-host of KOOP 91.7fm’s “Writing On The Air.” His second book of poetry, Element 615, was released in 2017.

Daria Howard is a Spoken Word Artist, Youth Development Professional at Boys & Girls Clubs of the Austin Area, and a Teaching Artist with the Speak Piece Poetry Project.

Kelene Blake-Fallon is a Spoken Word Artist, Health and Wellness Consultant, and Adjunct Professor in the Adult Degree Program at Huston-Tillotson University.

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric,  published by Graywolf Press in 2014, is the first work of poetry to become a New York Times bestseller for multiple weeks on the paperback nonfiction list. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and was also a finalist for the award in criticism, the first time in the history of those awards that a book was named a finalist in more than one category. “A classic that will be read, referred to and reflected on for generations” (Lit Hub), Citizen is a genre-bending work of art combining lyric prose with internal monologues, visual art, slogans, photographs, quotes, a screen grab from YouTube, and film scripts. It is a touchstone for talking candidly about racism. And it is a time capsule of contemporary headlines and key figures, with references to, among other things, Hurricane Katrina, the tennis champion Serena Williams, the 2006 World Cup, and the fatal shooting of Florida resident Trayvon Martin. Through a series of vignettes, the book recounts everyday moments of racism “of a kind that accumulate until they become a poisonous scourge: being skipped in line at the pharmacy by a white man, because he has failed to notice you in front of him; being told approvingly, as a schoolchild, that your features are like those of a white person; being furiously accosted by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she is expecting could look like you” (The New Yorker). “I started working on Citizen as a way of talking about invisible racism—moments that you experience and that happen really fast,” Rankine told The New Yorker.

Jamaican-born author Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. She is the editor of several poetry anthologies, serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2016. Also in 2016, following ten years of teaching at Pomona College in Claremont, California, she was named the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

Join us in celebrating the launch of the novel Collision Theory by Adrian Todd Zuniga. With readings from Adrian and Jason Neulander.

Collision Theory is Adrian Todd Zuniga’s memorably heartfelt and headlong debut novel. Its suddenness, its unexpectedness, its humor, and its humanity make for an unforgettable, surprising, and emotional read.

Adrian Todd Zuniga (below left) is a creator and host of Literary Death Match, and is the founding editor of Opium Magazine, which is a reading series that occurs regularly in New York City, San Francisco, and London, and has launched in 54 cities worldwide including Beijing, Edinburgh, Chicago, and Paris. Zuniga is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer for his short fiction and an award-winning journalist.

Jason Neulander (below right) is an award-winning theatre artist, filmmaker, and producer based in Austin, Texas. He founded and was the artistic director of Austin’s premiere producer of new plays Salvage Vanguard Theater from 1994 to 2008. His transmedia sci-fi multiverse THE INTERGALACTIC NEMESIS, which he wrote, directed, and produced, premiered in 2010 and has taken the form of graphic novels, a YouTube series, podcasts, audio dramas, novels, and a live theatrical tour. It was adapted for television by PBS. His feature film debut Fugitive Dreams shoots in 2018. “A seemingly inexhaustible ability to surprise. And thrill. And horrify. And amuse. And intrigue.” —The Austin Chronicle

Austin Writers Roulette is an 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 “Drugs & Fantasies”—because sometimes you just need to get away! The lineup of featured artists include: HELEN BUCK, R.G. HOOK, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.

Join us for a reading with Anna Maria Hong and Roger Reeves. We’ll be celebrating the release of Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, and also her novella, H & G, which won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize and has been just published by Sidebrow Books.

Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2017 First Book Poetry Competition and will be published in April 2018. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize and will be published by Sidebrow Books in May 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in 2019. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry and fiction in over 50 journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Ecotone, POOL, Fence, Harvard Review, The Volta, Verse Daily, Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She will join the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018.

Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collection King Me (Copper Canyon) and recipient of honors and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He earned his MFA from the Michener Center in 2010 and his PhD in English from UT’s Dept of English, and he previously taught at University of Illinois/Chicago.

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 Ken Fontenot, a poet and novelist who lives in Austin. He is author of four books of poetry, including In a Kingdom of Birds, which was names best book of poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters, and All My Animals and Stars, which won the Austin Book Award; and a novel, For Mr. Raindrinker.

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 features readings from José Skinner and Oscar Cásares. José will be reading from his short story collection, The Tombstone Race, and Oscar will read from his novel Amigoland.

José Skinner is the author of two short story collections, The Tombstone Race and Flight and Other Stories. He worked as an English/Spanish court and conference interpreter in New Mexico before earning his MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction and translations have appeared in Quarterly West, Colorado Review, Other Voices, Bilingual Review, Puerto del Sol, and other literary journals, and his nonfiction in anthologies such as Desde las Heridas: Transborder Testimonies and Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence. He was co-founder and director of the bilingual MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas-Pan American. He now lives in Austin, Texas.

Oscar Cásares is the author of the story collection Brownsville, and the novel Amigoland, which have earned him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copernicus Society of America, and the Texas Institute of Letters. His first book, Brownsville, was selected by American Library Association as a Notable Book of 2004.  Amigoland, a novel also set in Brownsville, was the 2009 selection for the Mayor’s Book Club in Austin, a citywide reading campaign supported by the Austin Public Library. His essays have appeared in Texas Monthly, the New York Times, and on National Public Radio. His new novel, Where We Come From, is due out May 2019. Since 2004, he has taught creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Harold Whit Williams’ new poetry collection, Red Clay Journal. Harold will be joined by poet and firefighter Tim Krcmarik.

Harold Whit Williams is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather. He is a 2018 Pushcart Prize Nominee, and also recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize. His collection, Backmasking, was winner of the 2013 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press, and his latest, Red Clay Journal, is available from FutureCycle Press.  

Tim Krcmarik is a 12-year veteran of the Austin Fire Department and is a Lieutenant on Engine 1 downtown. His first book, The False Lark, was published by Diabolical Genius Press in 2013 and a pamphlet, The Heights, appeared in 2008 as part of the Lost Horse Press New Poets/ Short Books series. He is a recipient of the Paul Engle Fellowship from the University of Iowa and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Austin with his wife and son.

Join us for a FREE monthly reading series, Malvern’s Multi-Verse, in which we explore the infinite possible (multi)verses of Austin’s boundless literary universe! Space-time might be flat and stretch out infinitely, but Malvern’s Multi-Verse is well-rounded, lasts for about an hour, and includes free cookies! Yes indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds…

This month’s guest is mónica teresa ortiz, who will be discussing, among other things, her forthcoming collection muted blood, which probes the intersection of policing and borders across bodies, sexualities, ethnicities, genders, asking what it might take to thrive. Responding to Spicer’s After Lorca, ortiz conjures “the skeleton of that tender-hearted crocodile,” Lorca’s ghost, to witness resistance, resilience, against violence and erasure.

mónica teresa ortiz was born and raised in Texas. Her work has recently appeared in Winter Tangerine Review, Texas Review, Southwestern Literature, and her first poetry collection, muted blood, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in summer 2018. ortiz also is the poetry editor for Raspa, a Queer Latinx literary journal and can be found on Instagram or Twitter: @elgallosalvaje.

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!

fields magazine and the New Writers Project present an evening with Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf. This program was made possible in part with a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. His first book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is just out with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College.