Welcome to Malvern Books!
Malvern Books is now closed. Malvern Books was a bookstore and community space in Austin, Texas. We specialized in visionary literature and poetry from independent publishers, with a focus on lesser-known and emerging voices.
An Update from the Manager of Malvern Books
Dear Friends,
We’ve had a wonderful time sharing our favorite books with you over the past nine years, and it’s been an honor to celebrate the work of so many brilliant writers through our readings and events.
Malvern Books is the realization of Joe Bratcher’s vision—Joe dreamt of a bookstore that would carry the books he loved, mostly poetry and fiction from small, independent presses. He wanted to promote writers and translators of books from other countries, while also championing the work of local writers.
When Joe first talked to me about opening Malvern Books, I must admit I was skeptical. I didn’t think we’d find an audience. It was 2012 and everyone was saying that bookstores were dead, Kindle and online shopping were the future. I anticipated many quiet sales days, with Joe and I just sitting there, looking at each other. He told me if that’s how it ended up, well, at least we’d have a chance to chat—and since we always seemed to laugh a lot when we talked, it sounded like a good way to spend some time. And so from then on, whenever we’d have a really slow sales day, with just a few people coming in, we’d look at each other and say, “We’re living the dream!” and we’d laugh.
But back to opening… in early 2013, with the help of our amazing architect, contractor, and interior designer, we created the space that Joe had in mind. We started posting on social media thanks to Tracey, our wonderful digital media manager and first Malvern hire. And we were so grateful to the many enthusiastic writers and readers who expressed their excitement at the imminent arrival of Malvern Books. From the very beginning it felt like we were building a community.
We opened our doors in October 2013, and we were shocked by how many people came by. You showed up and you loved what we had to offer! You constantly surprised and humbled us with your kind words and helpful suggestions. People from out of town would visit the store because a local friend had told them they had to come by, and we received much appreciated shout-outs from the Austin Chronicle and numerous other newspapers and journals.
And then 2020 hit—but even with the pandemic, we had loyal customers who came by for curbside pick ups, signed up for individual shopping appointments, and participated in our Zoom book clubs and events. If we didn’t say it enough, THANK YOU!
All along the way, we were lucky enough to have truly wonderful staff members who loved the books we carried and who helped us build the store we have now. Their work has been invaluable and we could not have done this without them.
On July 28th of this year, we lost Joe. I can’t tell you how hard it has been to try and carry on in this space without him. Our little Malvern world has not been the same since, and, as much as we love this store and our amazing customers, Malvern Books simply cannot continue without our Joe.
Malvern Books will be closing on December 31st, 2022. It has been a wonderful nine years and we thank each and every one of our cherished customers, friends, staff, and suppliers for helping us along the way.
As we move forward, we’ll be sharing our plans with you for sales and specials. For now, we just wanted to let you know this was coming. We hope you all continue to seek out works in translation and books published by small presses—there is so much great stuff out there—and that you continue to support our local independent bookstores, like our dear friends at BookWoman, among others. But, most importantly, we hope to see you in the store sometime soon, to say goodbye and to thank you, both for being the readers that you are and because you have come with us on this incredibly fulfilling journey in Joe’s world.
With heartfelt thanks and wishing you all the best,
Becky Garcia,
Manager, Malvern Books
Join us in celebrating the 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.
Get your cones ready for a special Galentine’s Edition of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld & Schandra Madha. We’ll be celebrating the best kind of love there is: the love of your girl gang!
Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Sheenika Medard, Christina Romero, and Breana Miller.
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.
~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.
~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
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.
In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
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.
Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Amanda Scott and Rachel Gray.
Amanda Scott earned an MA in technical communication at Texas State University, where she teaches writing. Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Word Riot, and most recently, The Common.
Rachel Gray is a writer living in Austin, TX. Her work has been published in Two Serious Ladies, the Oklahoma Review, and Hobart. She mostly grades essays but sometimes finds escape in beautiful people and places around her.
~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.
~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
Join us for a 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
In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
Our April open mic will be an official City Read for the Austin International Poetry Festival! 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.
Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
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.
Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Vanessa Couto Johnson, Taisia Kitaiskaia, and Amanda North.
Vanessa Couto Johnson’s “Try the yen relish,” a sixteen-page prose poem sequence, has recently been released in a first BoxSet from Oxidant | Engine. Softblow, Thrush, Field, Blackbird, Cheat River Review, Cream City Review, and other journals have featured her poetry. Her third chapbook, speech rinse, won Slope Editions’ 2016 Chapbook Contest; her second chapbook is rotoscoping collage in Cork City (dancing girl press, 2016); and her first chapbook, Life of Francis, won Gambling the Aisle’s 2014 Chapbook Contest. Favorite ice cream flavor: Neapolitan.
Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, illustrated by Katy Horan, and Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and her poems can be found in journals such as Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, jubilat, Guernica, The Fairy Tale Review, and Fence.
Amanda North lives, writes, and teaches in Austin, Texas, though she was born, and her heart resides, in the border town of El Paso. Amanda is a lecturer in the English Department and Honors College at Texas State University. She has poems published or forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, The Open Bar at Tin House, The Learned Pig, and Yew Journal. Her favorite ice cream flavor is rocky road, mostly for the nostalgia.
~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.
~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems. With host David Meischen, and readings from Patricia Spears Bigelow, Barbara Brannon, Claire Vogel Camargo, Cyra S. Dumitru, Chip Dameron, Martha K. Grant, Lucy Griffith, Vivé Griffith, Cindy Huyser, John Milkereit, Allene Nichols, Donna Peacock, Lynn Reynolds, Matthew Riley, Betty Stanton, Chuck Taylor, Eileen Youens, Allyson Whipple, and Vanessa Zimmer-Powell.
Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems is the third collection in a unique series from Dos Gatos Press, Poetry of the American Southwest—following up on Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga (2013) and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (2016). Each poem is exactly one hundred words, no more, no less. Within this restriction, however, you’ll find poems as varied as the landscape, the history, the people they evoke. Weaving the Terrain includes stunning prose poems and haibun, as well as poems in every shape made possible by a poet’s imagination and the hundred words chosen. Each poem is a concentrated gem on a topic related to the broad area known as the Southwest.
Editors David Meischen and Scott Wiggerman have arranged 211 poems by 151 poets in eight engaging chapters, opening with “These Immediate Splendors,” poems that will immerse you in momentary delights, and closing with “Necklace of Stones,” poems that explore grief, loss, endurance. In between, you’ll find chapters with these evocative titles: “Body of Memory,” “Songs of the Living,” “Sienna and Sand,” “Half-Lives Slowly Ticking,” “All Hunger and Thirst,” and “Rooted in Resilience.” Award-winning poets include Dorothy Alexander, Gloria Amescua, Shayna Begay, Alan Birkelbach, Lauren Camp, Chip Dameron, Gregory Louis Candela, karla k. morton, Elina Petrova, Brenda Nettles Riojas, Sharon Suzuki-Martinez, Larry D. Thomas, and Loretta Diane Walker.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Loren Stell’s new poetry collection, Topknot Analysis. With readings from Loren and also David Meischen, who will read from his memoir in progress, Crossing the Nueces: Reflections on a Divided Life, as well as poems that resonate with the memoir. He will share excerpts from his Pushcart winning chapter, as well as from a chapter published in Fashionably Late: Gay, Bi, and Trans Men Who Came Out Later in Life.
Topknot Analysis represents the layered, complex—sometimes frighteningly beautiful, or beautifully frightening—conflicts between our inner and outer worlds. The person we were, are becoming, will be, reflected in discordant and melodic poems that both sooth and agitate. A book of poems you might find in the libraries of existentialist, Buddhist or Baptist seekers, lovers and preachers.
Son of Texas, Loren Stell, in Austin for five years, reads poems about his life-long, ex-pat life on the East coast. Leaving Charlotte, North Carolina for Harlem was Loren’s first step in a Jack Kerouac-styled journey that led to post-graduate degrees in theology, psychology, film and poetry from Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. As a journalist and filmmaker, Loren chronicled events and people from the outside. After decades as a psychoanalyst, he’s viewed life from the inside out. Writing poems about our mysterious, labyrinthine world served as a compass and reverie.
David Meischen has been honored by a Pushcart Prize for his autobiographical essay, “How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You,” originally published in The Gettysburg Review and available in Pushcart Prize XLII. Recipient of the 2017 Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters, Meischen has fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Evansville Review, Salamander, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, he lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.
Join us for a reading from participants of the Free Minds writing workshop. Students will share their original works of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. All are welcome to attend!
Members of the Free Minds writing workshop meet to produce and share writing in a supportive group environment. These workshops are founded on the principle that each person has a unique and powerful voice which deserves to be heard. Free Minds is a collaboration between Foundation Communities, UT Austin, and ACC which offers educational and creative opportunities to adults who have faced barriers to higher education. To learn more about our free community writing workshops or our two-semester course in humanities, visit Free Minds Austin or call 512.610.7961.
Join us in celebrating the release of the Spring 2018 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.
Come celebrate the release of chapbooks generated through a partnership between writers in the St. Edward’s University Poetry II class and graphic designers-in-residence from the Risograph Lab. Authors Quentin Arch, Awbrey Collins, Davey De La Garza, Miguel Escoto, Allyson Garcia, Sam Griffith, Betsy McKinney, Gavin Quinn, and Sophie Velasquez will read from their work. Designers Brandy Shigemoto and Edith Valle will be on hand to talk about the collaboration process with faculty mentors Sasha West and Jimmy Luu.
Join us in celebrating the launch of a new issue of Echo Literary Magazine.
Echo Literary Magazine is a publication of the University of Texas at Austin’s Liberal Arts Honors Program. It showcases the work of UT undergraduates from all majors and programs. Echo accepts submissions of poetry, prose, and visual art, including photography.
Join Hothouse Literary Journal for a reading from its spring publication. There will be copies of the free journal to pick up, a reading from some of the published writers, light refreshments, and conversation. Bring your friends! All are welcome.
Hothouse Literary Journal is the official journal for the UT English Department. They publish poetry, nonfiction, and fiction stories from multiple genres every year.
VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities) invite you to a very special edition of the Lion and Pirate Unplugged Open Mic. As well as our regular Open Mic event for performers of all ages and abilities, this month we are delighted to have a special guest, Maria R. Palacios. A poet, author, spoken word performer, motivational speaker, and disability rights activist, Maria will share with us her new book, Bubbles of Ableism: A Disabled Woman’s Journey of Love & Motherhood. (For those of you considering bringing younger children to the Open Mic, please note that Maria’s work sometimes deals with more adult themes like sex and sexuality.)
Featured on numerous local radio shows and podcasts, nationally syndicated programs, and in many international publications, Maria Palacios’ impact on the rights of children, women, people with disabilities, and the Hispanic community is as immeasurable as her artistry is undeniable.
Some of Maria’s most cherished accomplishments and positions include her participation in efforts that led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; being inducted into the Hispanic Women in Leadership Hall of Fame in 1996 and receiving the Hispanic Excellence Award in 1997; being a member of the International Guild of Disabled Artists and Performers since 2009; exploring her personal connection to Frida Kahlo through live performances of her poetry at Houston’s annual Frida Fest celebration for seven straight years; participating in the Gulf Coast Poetry Tour (2009); and creating a publishing company (Atahualpa Press). Of particular passion to Maria is Sins Invalid, a performance project of artists with disabilities. With this group she has performed since 2007, co-facilitated their Tongue Rhythm Multi-Disciplinary Poetry Workshop in 2008, and is featured in the 2013 documentary, Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility. In the artistic world, Maria is known as “The Goddess on Wheels.”
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 Cyrus Cassells, whose sixth volume of poetry, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, is out now from Southern Illinois University Press.
Cyrus Cassells is the author of The Mud Actor, winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series Competition; Soul Make a Path through Shouting, nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and The Crossed-Out Swastika, finalist for the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2012. He teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.
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 has a terrifying vampire twist, with C.S. Humble reading from The Massacre at Yellow Hill, a Wild West vampire adventure, and A.K. Fagan reading from a horror novel that takes place in a world where governments have conspired to hide vampires’ existence from the public.
C.S. Humble is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in East Texas. His debut novel The Massacre at Yellow Hill is a Weird Western adventure available through Black Rose Writing.
Born and raised in Austin, Texas, A. K. Fagan is a long-time aspiring author. Her first completed horror erotica novel, Sweet Cinnamon and Honey, Book One of the Blood and Lust series, was brought to Lulu with the help of friends, family, and online fans. Fagan has been writing horror erotica stories online for several years before the publication of Sweet Cinnamon and Honey and has garnered the support from the online writing community. Fagan 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, as well as a beautiful Husky named Yuki who, despite her breed, prefers to lounge in the sun and sleep the day away. Fagan also enjoys playing RPGs, reading, and watching anime. Other hobbies include travel, learning new languages, and studying psychology.
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 writer Natalia Sylvester.
Natalia Sylvester is the author of the novels Chasing the Sun and Everyone Knows You Go Home, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by Real Simple. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Miami and is a faculty member of the low-res MFA program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Natalia’s articles have appeared in Latina Magazine, Writer’s Digest, The Austin American-Statesman, and NBCLatino.com. Born in Lima, Peru, she came to the U.S. at age four and spent time in South and Central Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas before her family set roots in Miami. She now lives and works in Austin.
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.
This all-women reading features writers from the Revolution Writing Workshop led by Abe Louise Young. Join us for poetry and prose about mothering, queer and straight parenting, being mothered and unmothered, sex, Mother Earth, and more! Readers include: Angeliska Polachek, Jamie Harris, Erin Flynn, Rebecca Whitehurst, Robin Bradford, Marcela Contreras, and Kandice Farmer.
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 “Minding Another’s Business.” The featured artists include: LIABLEWRITER, ALLISON JONES, KELLY CARA, CARRIE ANN PAULO, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, BRENNAN UTLEY, SPENCER MIRABAL, TERESA Y ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.
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 Cecily Sailer.
Cecily Sailer is the programs director for The Library Foundation, which runs the Badgerdog Creative Writing Program—a community-based literary arts education program for writers of all ages and skill levels. Cecily holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston, and has taught creative writing to a variety of audiences. On the side, she coaches writers through book projects, and writes occasional book reviews for The Dallas Morning News. She is also the founder of Typewriter Tarot, a collective of writers who offer Tarot readings in private or event settings.
Join us for an evening with David Abel and Cathy Eisenhower.
Poet and editor David Abel is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. Two new books were released late in 2017: Selected Durations, an artist’s book published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada, Reno, and XIV Eclipses, a series of performative poems/scores from Couch Press in Portland; two chapbooks are forthcoming: Sequitur Her, from press-press-pull in Portland, and Equifinality, from Crane’s Bill in Albuquerque. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series (now in its seventeenth year), he is also an occasional curator and educator, and a consultant with the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a psychotherapist in Austin and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), would with and (Roof 2009), distance decay (Ugly Duckling 2015), and animalitos (Primary Writing 2017). She has translated the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and co-curated the In Your Ear Reading Series in Washington, DC, for several years. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.
Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Claudia Delfina Cardona, Nia Brookins, and Maggie Ilersich.
~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.
~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
Join us in celebrating the recent release of Amanda Johnston’s debut poetry collection, Another Way to Say Enter. Amanda will be joined by Lisa L. Moore.
In Amanda Johnston’s debut collection, Another Way to Say Enter, readers are offered glimpses of scenes as if peering through windows and doors. Bright and sharp, precise in their Imagism, Johnston’s poems distill moments to their essence, challenge notions of what it means to fully examine a life day by day, room by room. These poems are both visceral and spiritual, reminding the reader that entry, departure, and the inevitable return is a journey that must be felt, not just imagined. —Teneice Durrant, Argus House Press
Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press). Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them Callaloo, Poetry, Kinfolks Quarterly, Muzzle, Pluck! and the anthologies Small Batch, di-ver-city and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts.
Lisa L. Moore is an Alberta-born writer who has lived in Austin, Texas for almost thirty years. She’s the author of the chapbook 24 Hours of Men (Dancing Girl, 2018). Her poems have appeared recently in Nimrod International Journal, The Fourth River, and Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. Her poetry and critical writing have been recognized with the Art/Lines Juried Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Foundation Book Award. The author or editor of five books of literary criticism, she teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
Join us for a reading from members of Donna M. Johnson’s literary nonfiction workshop. Readers include Jay Byrd, Carrie Kenny, Jennifer Patterson, Marcie Bruscato Poss, Beth Remsburg, Nettie Reynolds, Rosaia Shepard, Steph Steele, Robin Storey, and Mahani Zubedy.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Take To The Territory, Jim Trainer’s fourth collection of poetry and prose through Yellow Lark Press. With readings from Jim, Ignacio Carvajal, and Christine Schiele.
Singer-songwriter, journalist, and curator of Going For The Throat, a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance, Jim Trainer publishes one collection of poetry and prose every year through Yellow Lark Press. Please visit his website for Take To The Territory, his latest collection, and for music, film, and appearances.
Photo credit: Adam Glick Photography
Ignacio “Brown Thought” Carvajal is from Costa Rica. He’s a PhD student of Latin American Literature at UT Austin. He’s a member of the Latino Writers Collective of Kansas City and the Taller Literario Don Chico in San José, Costa Rica. His work has appeared in the anthologies @Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.
Christine Schiele is a writer, storyteller and, at times, a performance artist. Under various names, she has brought her passion for the bizarre to stages at FronteraFest, Testify, Bedpost Confessions, LAFF! (Ladies Are Funny Festival), The Living Room: Storytime for Grownups, Kink Ball and Weird! True Hollywood Tales (RIP). Christine also performs as a mentalist with the magic act Turning Tricks with The Darlings.
Join us in celebrating the recent release of Rachel Z. Arndt’s essay collection, Beyond Measure.
With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Rachel Z. Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the standardized height of kitchen countertops; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute. “How much can data tell us?” Arndt asks, challenging us to consider the simultaneous comfort and absurdity of our exhaustively quantified—yet never entirely quantifiable—lives.
Rachel Z. Arndt received MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and nonfiction editor of the Iowa Review. Her writing has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Quartz, Pank, and Fast Company, among others. She is currently the assistant editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series and a reporter. She lives in Chicago.
Join us for an evening with Elizabeth Threadgill, Melissa Cundieff and Roger Jones. Elizabeth Threadgill is celebrating the launch of her chapbook Tangled in the Light (Finishing Line Press), and Melissa Cundieff is celebrating the launch of her book Darling Nova (Autumn House Press).
Elizabeth Threadgill holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Developmental Education-Literacy, both from Texas State University. She grew up in Marfa, Texas, and now lives in upstate New York with her husband, poet James Henry Knippen. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Utica College. Tangled in the Light marks Elizabeth’s poetry debut and is representative of landscape and life in rural Texas.
Melissa Cundieff is the author of Darling Nova, selected by Alberto Ríos for the 2017 Autumn House Press Full-Length Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt, and her poems have appeared in such places as Best of the Net, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Mid-American Review, TriQuarterly, and Four Way Review. Originally from Texas, she lives in Saint Paul, MN with her two children.
Roger Jones has a BA and MA from Sam Houston State University and a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University. He has taught at SHSU, Oklahoma State and Lamar University in Beaumont, and since 1987, has taught at Texas State University in San Marcos, where he has served since 1998 on the MFA Creative Writing poetry faculty. He has published poems in various journals since the 1970s. The Texas Review Press published his chapbook Remembering New London in 1981, and his full collections Strata (1993) and Are We There Yet? (2008). In 2015, Finishing Line Press published his chapbook Familial, and his collection of Japanese haibun poems Goodbye was published as an electronic chapbook in 2017 by the Snapshot Press in the UK.
Please join us for a celebratory reading by the writers of S. Kirk Walsh’s nine-month fiction workshop (Sept-June). Short excerpts from novels and short stories will be read.
Participating writers include Cristina Adams, Erin Augustine, Nicole Beckley, Deborah de Freitas, Matt Holmes, Lisa Jackson, Jack Kaulfus, Alejandro Puyana, Victoria Rossi, Ramona Reeves, Siobhan Welch, and Stefani Zellmer. This talented group of writers features published fiction and nonfiction writers, book critics, and MFA graduates. For the past nine months, they have participated in an intensive fiction workshop, drafting and revising novels and short stories throughout the year. Please join us in celebrating their inspiring work and distinctive voices with this end-of-the-workshop reading. Refreshments and sweets will be served.
In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
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 “Never-Ending Tomorrow”—who knows when this s@#% will end? Take a break from the never-ending heat with our lineup of featured poets and storytellers: NICOLE CORTICHIATO, HALEY CAMPBELL, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, RG HOOK, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, & THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows.Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.
Join us in celebrating the launch of award-winning author Roger Thompson’s new book, No Word for Wilderness: Italy’s Grizzlies and the Race to Save the Rarest Bears on Earth (Ashland Creek Press).
In Italian, there is no word for wilderness. Yet in the mountains of Italy, brown bears not only exist, they are fighting to survive amid encroaching development, local and international politics, and the mafia. This meticulously researched and eye-opening book tells the incredible stories of two special populations of bears in Italy—one the last vestige of a former time that persists against all odds, the other a great experiment in re-wilding that, if successful, promises to change how we see not only Italy but all of Europe. The stories of these bears take readers on a spectacular journey across Italy, where we come face-to-face not only with these fascinating species but with embattled park directors, heroic environmentalists, innovative scientists, and a public that is coming to terms with the importance of Italy’s rich natural history. Award-winning author Roger Thompson has traveled throughout Italy documenting the history and current crises of these bears, and the result is an engaging and in-depth examination that resonates across all endangered species and offers invaluable insights into the ever-evolving relationships between human and non-human animals in a rapidly changing world.
Roger Thompson is an award-winning nonfiction writer and director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. His work and features have appeared in the New York Times, theatlantic.com, Ozy, Quartz, Raw Vision, and others, and he is senior editor for a fine art photography magazine based in Brooklyn.
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 donating all proceeds from this Novel Night to CASA and Malaria No More.
This month’s Novel Night guests are Maureen Asantewaa and H.R. Young-Lira. Maureen will be reading from her debut novel, Tenth Year in the Sun, and H.R. Young-Lira will also be sharing her debut novel, The Truth About Sunday Minor.
In high school, Maureen Asantewaa dreamt of writing, but it would be over twenty years before she entertained the idea of writing as a career. In the meantime, she began work in Human Resources in Houston and D.C. before eventually moving overseas. There, she experienced many fulfilling moments as she traveled and lived around the world. Later, as Maureen delved into fiction, she made sisterhood and West African culture a recurring theme in her work. She crafts her inspirational literature from her home base in Austin, Texas. Maureen’s debut novel, Tenth Year in the Sun, is a women’s fiction story inspired by her experiences and the connections she made in her life at home and abroad. Maureen describes the novel as being “at the intersection of Women’s Fiction and West African culture.”
H.R. Young-Lira is a Texas writer living east of Austin among the loblollies of Lost Pines Forest. She is shopkeeper of Loblolly Lost, an online bookstore of curated collectibles for the personal library. She graduated from the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Texas State University. The Truth About Sunday Minor is her first novel.
It’s Bloomsday! Named for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloomsday is observed around the world on June 16th, as this is the date during which the events of Ulysses are relived (16th June, 1904). Join us for a celebration of the life of James Joyce, with short readings from Ulysses (sign up in store on the day if you’d like to read!) and suitably Irish snacks.
You’re invited to join us for the sixth Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s readers are Elizabeth Crook, Spike Gillespie, Alyce Guynn, and Ray Bonneville (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.
Elizabeth Crook lived in Nacogdoches, Texas and then San Marcos, Texas with her parents and brother and sister until age seven when the family moved to Washington D.C. She attended Baylor University for two years and graduated from Rice University in 1982. She has written five novels: The Raven’s Bride and Promised Lands, published by Doubleday and reissued by SMU Press as part of the Southwest Life and Letters series; The Night Journal, published by Viking/Penguin in 2006 and reissued in paperback by Penguin; Monday, Monday, published by Sarah Crichton Books, FSG, in April 2014 and reissued in paperback from Picador; and The Which Way Tree, published by Little, Brown and Company, available in February 2018 and optioned by Maverick Films LLC with Robert Duvall to star. Elizabeth has written for periodicals such as Texas Monthly and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and served on the council of the Texas Institute of Letters and the board of the Texas Book Festival. She is a member of Women Writing the West, Western Writers of America, and was selected the honored writer for 2006 Texas Writers’ Month. Her first novel, The Raven’s Bride, was the 2006 Texas Reads: One Book One Texas selection. The Night Journal was awarded the 2007 Spur award for Best Long Novel of the West and the 2007 Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction. Monday, Monday was awarded the 2015 Jesse H. Jones award for fiction. Elizabeth currently lives in Austin with her family.
Spike Gillespie is the critically acclaimed author of many books and countless magazine articles. Austin Chronicle readers voted her Best Memoirist in Austin in 2016 and 2017. She writes the blogs EmotionalRapeSurvivor.com and MeditationKicksAss.com. Spike’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Real Simple, GQ, Esquire, Elle, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, Interweave KNITS, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News, and other publications. In 2006, Austin Chronicle readers voted her Best Author in Austin. Spike also provides commentary for Austin’s NPR affiliate, KUT. She lives on a ranch just outside of Austin with horses, cows, chickens, and dogs.
Alyce Guynn has always loved words, especially when served up with a heaping helping of music. She began public reading at Austin’s iconic Alamo Lounge and emmajoe’s. Alyce also loves collaboration. Deal Me In, her book of 52 love poems, is illustrated by Jesse ‘Guitar’ Taylor. She enjoys performing with musicians who add their magic to her words. The chapbook Beyond Blue is her homage to the late Champ Hood, with whom, along with Marvin Dykhuis, she often performed. Marvin and Alyce recorded a CD featuring poems from Deal Me In with Marvin providing the music. Alyce’s poems appear in Feeding the Crow, Seventh Quarry, various chapbooks, magazines, liner notes, blogs and anthologies. She arrived in Austin in the mid-sixties as a newspaper reporter and has worked the last 33 years as an antitrust investigator.
Ray Bonneville is a poet of the demimonde who didn’t write his first song until his early 40s, some 20 years after he started performing. But with a style that sometimes draws comparisons to JJ Cale and Daniel Lanois, this blues-influenced, New Orleans-inspired “song and groove man,” as he’s been so aptly described, luckily found his rightful calling. Born in Quebec, his family moved to Boston when he was 12. He served a year in Vietnam as a Marine, struggled and overcame drug addiction, earned a pilot’s license in Colorado, then moved to Alaska, then Seattle, and Paris and New Orleans. But it took a close call while piloting a seaplane across the Canadian wilderness to make him decide it was time to get busy writing songs. He’s since earned many accolades, including a Juno Award for his 1999 album, Gust of Wind. His post-Katrina ode, “I Am the Big Easy,” earned the International Folk Alliance’s 2009 Song of the Year Award, and in 2012, Bonneville won the solo/duet category in the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge. Easy Gone, Ray’s fourth album for Red House Records, takes listeners to some of the dark spaces and exotic places Bonneville has gone on his own travels. An Austin resident since 2006, Bonneville still puts the rhythms and soul of New Orleans into much of his music. His songs carry a groove and momentum that’s uniquely his—and will always be a part of him, no matter where he roams.
Join us in celebrating the recent release of visiting author Mark Haskell Smith’s novel Blown. With host Jill Alexander Essbaum.
Biting satire and criminal mischief abound in Mark Haskell Smith’s new novel Blown, which follows a Wall Street trader who disappears—with millions in stolen cash—and the madcap team of investigators on his trail in the Cayman Islands in this hot, hilarious case of offshore banking gone awry. Wickedly funny, ribald, and sharp-eyed, Blown starts as a simple case of embezzlement and explodes into a fatal high-stakes gamble for money and the pursuit of happiness.
Mark Haskell Smith is the author of five novels, most recently Raw: A Love Story, and the nonfiction book Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Vulture. He lives in Los Angeles.
Get your cones ready for the third anniversary of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha.
When we first started the I Scream Social, our vision was that a small group of young women writers from Austin would come together for just one summer to share what they’d been working on while eating some free ice cream. But that one summer turned into three years and that small group turned into an incredible, diverse community of artists from across the country breaking all the moulds of what the written & spoken word can do. And the ice cream just turned into even more ice cream.
To celebrate our third birthday, we’ll have ice cream cake, raffled prizes, a photo booth, and, of course, the open mic!
~7pm – Inclusive open mic. All are welcome. Don’t be shy!
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
Join us for a reading and exhibit to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
Bring friends – join the celebration! The event is free of charge and open to everyone.
Keynote poet is Joe Brundidge, a well-known presence at Austin poetry scenes for nearly 20 years. A frequent host and public speaker, Brundidge co-hosts KOOP 91.7FM’s “Writing on the Air” and is a former director of the International Poetry Festival and of the “Spoken & Heard” poetry series. His most recent book, Element 615, was published by Lit City Press in 2017 and is reviewed in the new issue by Rachel A. Wise.
Featured artist Eric Tippeconnic, a member of the Comanche Nation, will engage us with an art talk based on his series “Comanche Motion” on view at the Bullock Texas State History Museum through Jan. 2, 2019. Tippeconnic’s vibrant artwork honors the Comanche culture historically and as a “living, thriving and contemporary” nation. Tippeconnic will sign limited edition posters of Borderlands issue 48 cover featuring his visually-striking artwork “Traditional Comanche Woman” as a special fundraiser for the journal.
Borderlands is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
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 Teresa Y. Roberson.
Author, spoken word poet and producer of The Austin Writers Roulette, Teresa Y. Roberson writes based on her survival skills honed through working and traveling globally, cooking and eating ethnic food, doing yoga and dancing, and challenging society’s preconceived ideas about minority women.
When Chinese novelist Su Wei and his translator Austin Woerner first met in 2005, little did they know that their friendship would spark a ten-year-long experiment in creative co-translation that would take them from the classrooms of Yale to the mountains of southern China and back again. Join Austin as he recounts this literary odyssey, culminating in the publication of his English translation of Su’s novel The Invisible Valley in English this April, by Small Beer Press. Austin will reveal the story behind the story, a coming-of-age narrative set during the Cultural Revolution against a backdrop of rainforest landscapes, Taoist mysticism, and Cantonese folklore. In the process he will share the joys and complexities of literary translation and his adventures in Chinese literature both on and off the page.
In tropical southern China, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a teenage boy named Lu Beiping stumbles upon a band of woodcutters living deep in the mountains. Outcasts from mainstream society, the “driftfolk,” as they call themselves, practice a secret faith whose central tenets would be heresy in the world Lu Beiping comes from. As he is drawn deeper into their way of life—a realm of strange freedoms and restrictions, where the line between magic and reality is not always clear—Lu must struggle with what is natural and what is truly deviant, and learn to play a precarious balancing act between two taboo-ridden worlds. (You can read an excerpt here.)
Like many Chinese writers of his generation, Su Wei spent his teenage years being “re-educated” through farm labor in the countryside, working for ten years on a rubber plantation in the mountains of tropical Hainan Island. He is known for his nonfiction essays as well as for his highly imaginative novels, which are seen as unique in their treatment of the Cultural Revolution. He fled China in 1989, and since 1997 he has taught Chinese language and literature at Yale University. The Invisible Valley is his first book to be translated into English.
A Chinese-English literary translator, Austin Woerner has translated two volumes of poetry, Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe and Phoenix, and edited the English edition of the innovative, bilingual Chinese literary journal Chutzpah! Together with Ou Ning, he co-edited the short fiction anthology Chutzpah! New Voices from China. He has a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School, and he is currently a lecturer at Duke Kunshan University.
Join us in celebrating the launch of the third 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.
In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
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 “Dog Days/Cat Nights”—the days may be long and grueling, but the freaks come out at night! The lineup of featured artists includes: RG HOOK, NICOLE CORTICHIATO, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows the featured artists. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.
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 novelist, poet, and essayist Anis Shivani.
Anis Shivani is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of several books of fiction, poetry, and criticism each, including, most recently, Karachi Raj: A Novel, Soraya: Sonnets, Literary Writing in the 21st Century: Conversations, and the forthcoming A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. His work appears in many leading literary journals.
Chaitali Sen is a writer and educator based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky, and numerous stories and essays which have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals. She is the founder of the interview series Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Keith R. Rees’ new novel, One Night in Bangkok.
Miles Devereaux, an ordinary, working class, family man, is thrust sixty years into the dazzling futuristic world of 2065 Bangkok, and into a life-and-death game of chess where the players and pieces’ fates depend on each player’s acumen. Requiring Miles to match wits and physical skills with an array of opponents while faced with solving the mystery of his time travel and how to return to his own time, One Night in Bangkok is a riveting adventure set in what might very well be our own future.
Keith R. Rees has been writing professionally for over 20 years. One Night in Bangkok, a science fiction work, is the first installment in what is projected to become The One Night Trilogy. He has always been a fan of science fiction, particularly stories that involve time travel, and writes stories that have both realistic and human sides to them.
Join us for an evening with Emmy Pérez, Leticia Urieta, Marilyse V. Figueroa, and Britt Haraway (left to right, below). Hosted by ire’ne lara silva.
Emmy Pérez is the author of With the River on Our Face and Solstice. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship. She’s a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop and is an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Leticia Urieta is proud Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She works as a teaching artist in the Austin community. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets Anthology, BorderSenses, Lumina, The Offing and others. She has recently completed her first mixed genre collection of poetry and prose and is currently at work completing her novel that tells the story of a Mexican soldadera caught up in the march to Texas during Texas’ war with Mexico.
Marilyse V. Figueroa is an unapologetic Scorpio just like Björk, and a proud queer femme Xicana – Puerto Riqueña from Oklahoma and Texas. Marilyse’s work has been published in Acentos Review, Southwestern American Literature, St. Sucia Zine, and many others. Marilyse has been the Director of the San Marcos, Texas Chapter of Barrio Writers Workshop since 2017, and she is currently the Artist-In-Residence at the Writing Barn in Austin. Her work embodies a fascination with hybridity–a mezcla of fiction, poetry, testimonio, sci-fi and fantasy. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and an experimental novella.
Britt Haraway has a short story collection Early Men which was published by Lamar University Literary Press. His stories have appeared in Natural Bridge, New Madrid, Great Weather for Media, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. His work was chosen for the Best Small Fictions 2016, guest edited by Stuart Dybek. He is an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the fiction editor for riverSedge magazine. He lives in McAllen Texas with his family.
Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Zoë Fay-Stindt, Alana Torrez, Desiree Morales, and Vivé Griffith.
Zoë Fay-Stindt was simultaneously raised in the boondocks of North Carolina and a small village in the south of France. She is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, GAUGE, The Ocotillo Review, and Black Napkin Press, among others. After earning her bachelor’s degree at Emerson College, she left Boston for the welcoming warmth of the heartland, where she has since served as program specialist for Clemente affiliate Free Minds, organizing community writing workshops and finding new students for the adult college course. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her marveling at parakeets or eating peanut butter cup ice cream at Sweet Ritual.
Alana Torrez is a native Austinite and I Scream diehard. She is currently finishing up her MFA at Texas State University, and holds out hope that the inanimate objects she talks to on a regular basis will someday talk back. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is whatever they serve in the WorryFree warehouses.
Desiree Morales is an educator, poet, and activist from Southern California, where she earned her BA in Creative Writing and Linguistics from Pitzer College. Since coming to Austin in 2010, she’s created and led programs that have served nearly 10,000 low income children in Travis County. She currently oversees a pilot project in Austin ISD offering entrepreneurial learning opportunities to students in South Austin and participates in the Cultural Proficiency and Inclusiveness initiative. Her work has appeared in What Rough Beast, Truck: I35 Creativity Corridor, and Conflict of Interest. Has yet to meet a coconut/non-dairy ice cream she doesn’t like, though chocolate is pretty great!
Vivé Griffith’s poetry and essays have appeared in The Sun, Oxford American, River Teeth, Hippocampus, and at the Blanton Museum. Her op-eds and advocacy pieces have been published in the Washington Post, Texas Tribune, Statesman, and Huffington Post. She is a voice for educational equity, a zealous sharer of poems, and a maker of first-class soups. When it comes to ice cream, a good chocolate gelato makes any summer evening better.
~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.
~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
Join us for 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 guests are Barbara Ann Wright, Matthew Borgard, and Erin Kennemer.
Barbara Ann Wright writes fantasy and sci-fi. Her fiction has made Tor.com’s Reviewer’s Choice books of 2012 and BookRiot’s 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors. She has been a Foreword Review BOTYA Finalist as well as a Goldie and Lambda Award finalist. She’s won five Rainbow Awards.
Matthew Borgard is a writer and software engineer living in Cedar Park. His short fiction has appeared in several collections, including the Stoker-nominated Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, as well as Crowded Magazine. His nonfiction writing has appeared on Eleven-ThirtyEight and in Cheyenne’s hometown newspaper, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle.
Erin Kennemer is a speculative fiction author of several short stories. She studied at Texas A&M and continues to owe them money to this day. You can find her elbow deep in the dirt outside on off days, either gardening or burying another body. If you want on her good side, bring hummus and veggies.
In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians.
This special edition of the Lion & the Pirate also features a reading from poet Mel Finefrock, who will be sharing her collection, Patchwork Poetry, and other poems. The Open Mic will be at 1pm, followed by Mel’s reading at 2pm.
Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free afternoon suitable for performers of all ages and abilities. Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
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 “Eight Reasons To…”—why do you do what you do? An open mic follows the featured artists. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.
Join us for a night of broads reading chap(book)s and broad(side)s! Featuring Claire Bowman, Julie Howd, Vanessa Couto Johnson, Bridget Brewer, Stephanie Goehring, and Julie Poole.
Claire Bowman (pictured top left) is a poet from Missouri. She earned a BA in English from Truman State University, and an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. Her chapbook, Dear Creatures, was published by Sutra Press in the fall of 2017. Her work can be found in Deluge, PANK, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Julie Howd (top middle) holds an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin. In 2015 she won the Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Creative Arts. Her work can be found in a number of anthologies and journals, including America’s Best Emerging Poets, Sixth Finch, inter|rupture, and elsewhere.
Vanessa Couto Johnson’s (top right) third chapbook, speech rinse, won Slope Editions’ 2016 Chapbook Contest; her second chapbook is rotoscoping collage in Cork City (dancing girl press, 2016); and her first chapbook, Life of Francis, won Gambling the Aisle’s 2014 Chapbook Contest. Pungent dins concentric, her first full-length book, is forthcoming from Tolsun Books later this year.
Bridget Brewer (bottom left) is a writer, artist, performer, and educator based in Austin, TX. She earned her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2016, and currently serves as the Fiction Co-Editor for Nat Brut. Her work has appeared in FANZINE, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, The Collagist, Awst Press, and elsewhere.
Stephanie Goehring (bottom middle) 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.
Julie Poole (bottom right) received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the New Writers’ Project at the University of Texas. Currently living in Austin, she is a volunteer reader for Pen-City Writers and a bookseller at Malvern Books.
Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Jessica Hincapie, Katherine Stingley, and Celia Bell.
~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.
~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
Join us in celebrating the recent launch of Laurie Filipelli’s new poetry collection, Girl Paper Stone. With musical guest flutist Marcela DeFaria Casaubon and a post-reading conversation led by author and composer Jan Bozarth.
In her luminous book, Filipelli remakes the constellations of a modern life. Her poems re-draw the lines between the parts of the world, helping us to see there are no divisions between planting a plumbago and watching the passage of hateful legislation, no space between grief for a lost father and the wonder of what he’s told the speaker: “the whale’s veins are so wide we could swim/ to her heart.” By looking so tenderly and incisively at the actual experience of a life, Filipelli makes us see our own differently. —Sasha West
Laurie Filipelli is the author of Elseplace (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013) and Girl Paper Stone (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her essays and poems have appeared at apt magazine, The Rumpus, Salamander, Superstition Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Yaddo fellowship and lives in Austin where she provides coaching and editing services through her business, Mighty Writing.
Join us in celebrating the launch of Austin: A Poem by Dave Oliphant (Alamo Bay Press). Dave will be joined by Kanya Lyons, who will share her video interview, “Dave Oliphant: Native Texas Poet.”
Written with knowledge and sympathy, the poem contains a delightful tangle of details. Lyndon Johnson, Elisabet Ney, Peter Flawn, Custer, O. Henry, and Joseph Jones (the sage of Waller Creek)—public figures and personal friends interact in the city of Oliphant’s imagination…. A lengthy proem, set at the grave of Stephen F. Austin in the State Cemetery, contains a brilliant passage about Austin in prison…. The oblique narration is kept on track with masterful transitions….[T]he language is carefully crafted, with interesting and often beautiful sound-play in virtually every line. —John Herndon, Austin American-Statesman
Dave Oliphant was born in 1939 in Fort Worth, Texas. Host Publications has published two of his collections of poetry, Memories of Texas Towns & Cities (2000) and Backtracking (2004). His Maria’s Poems (1987) won an Austin Book Award. Host has also published three books that he translated from the Spanish: Enrique Lihn’s Figures of Speech (1999); Oliver Welden’s Love Hound (2006), winner of best book of poetry at the 2007 New York Book Festival; and Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations (2009), winner of the 2011 translation award from the Texas Institute of Letters. KD: A Jazz Biography, his verse biography of Texas trumpeter Kenny Dorham, was published in 2012 by Wings Press, and The Pilgrimage: Selected Poems, 1962-2012 appeared from Lamar University Press in 2013. The poetry collections The Cowtown Circle and María’s Book were published by Alamo Bay Press in 2014 and 2016 respectively. He was with the University of Texas at Austin for 30 years, as an editor and a senior lecturer.
Join us for an evening with Elliott Turner, who will be reading from The Night of the Virgin, his award-winning debut novel.
The Night of the Virgin is 80,000 words of literary fiction that starts as a sports narrative and twists into a piercing confessional about the immigrant experience in the U.S. as its undocumented protagonist pursues his dream. It’s a fascinating read, particularly in this political climate.
Turner’s . . . expert knowledge of [soccer] is evident throughout, and it gives the story a near-journalistic authenticity. The novel as a whole … is richly drawn—a moving bildungsroman and a thoughtful reflection on what it means to lack a settled sense of self. —Kirkus Reviews
Elliott Turner’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, Fusion, Transect Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and many other journals. The Night of the Virgin is his debut novel, and a finalist for the International Latino Book Award for First Fiction. He studied political science at Emory University, and lives in Houston, Texas with his wife and three children.
Join us in celebrating the recent release of Hazem Fahmy’s debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer, winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Contest. Hazem will be joined by Jasmine C. Bell, Jordan Cooley, and Mark Cugini.
Hazem Fahmy is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet and critic from Cairo. He is currently pursuing his MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer, won the 2017 Diode Editions Contest. A Watering Hole Fellow, his poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in Apogee, HEArt, Mizna, and The Offing. His performances have been featured on Button Poetry and Write About Now. He is a reader for the Shade Journal, a poetry editor for Voicemail Poems, and a contributing writer to Film Inquiry.
Jasmine C. Bell (above left) is a poet and artist in Austin, Texas and currently attends the University of Texas in pursuit of her Master’s degree in Social Work. Jasmine has competed as part of the UT Spitshine CUPSI team from 2015-2017 and coached the team in 2018. She is Co-President of the only poetry organization on UT’s campus (Spitshine Poetry) where she leads workshops and organizes open mics. She was a 2017 Write Bloody Contest finalist and has been published or is forthcoming in Button Poetry, Write About Now, Vinyl, Bird’s Thumb, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, Monstering Magazine, and Apricity Magazine. She spends her time writing, studying, drawing, singing, and eating.
Jordan Cooley (above middle) is a writer and self taught artist in Austin, TX. She has work in or forth coming from Paper Darts, FIVE:2:ONE Press, Pressure Gauge Press, and others. When she isn’t writing, she’s doodling. She slings drinks for money, which is another way to say she loves to meet people and make things that those people enjoy.
Mark Cugini (They/Them/Theirs; above right) is a genderqueer poet, editor, and event curator from Staten Island, NY. They are the author of I’m Just Happy To Be Here (Ink Press, 2014) and have been published in Pen America, The Lifted Brow, Hyperallergic, Barrelhouse, and Noö. The founding editor of Big Lucks, they recently organized Whale Prom: An Alternative AWP Bookfair. They also really like whales.
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 “Out of Tune,” when the prevailing logic is illogical. The featured artists, sharing their discordant narratives, include: SPENCER MIRABAL, STEPHANIE ELISE FRENO, SHLOMI HARIF, HOPE RUIZ, TERESA Y. ROBERSON, and THOM THE WORLD POET. An open mic follows the featured artists. Visit the Austin Writers Roulette website for more information.
Everyone is welcome to attend the Austin Community College Creative Writing Department’s Literary Coffeehouse, hosted by John Herndon. An open mic follows the featured reader, so bring poems, stories, scripts, rants, raves or midnight confessions to share, or just come to listen and enjoy.
This month’s featured reader is Charlotte Gullick.
Charlotte Gullick is a novelist, essayist, editor, educator and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. Charlotte’s first novel, By Way of Water, was chosen by Jayne Anne Phillips as the Grand Prize winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program, and a special author’s edition was reissued by the Santa Fe Writers Project in November of 2013. Her other awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a MacDowell Colony Residency, a Ragdale Residency, Faculty of Year from College of the Redwoods as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award. She has taught in the Travis County Correctional Complex and organized classes and literary events for Veterans in the Austin Community. Additionally, she has presented twice at the Associated Writing Programs Annual Conference (Washington, DC and Chicago, IL) on offering writing courses for Veterans. Charlotte’s work often explores the intersection of landscape, legacy, family, and identity, and she believes deeply in the power of story to create healing and coherence. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and daughter.
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 is full of mystery (fiction)! Our guests are N. M. Cedeño, Meredith Lee, and Laura Oles.
N. M. Cedeño was born in Houston, grew up in the Dallas Metroplex, once lived in Amarillo, and currently lives near Austin, Texas. She writes mystery short stories and novels that are typically set in Texas. Her mysteries vary from traditional, to romantic suspense, to science fiction.
Meredith Lee is the pen name for the Austin-based writing team of Dixie Lee Evatt and Sue Meredith Cleveland. Their process includes research trips to foreign countries to sample wine and food and, when required, the occasional dramatic performance of a scene to make sure it “works.” Dixie Lee Evatt is a former political writer for the Austin American-Statesman. She later taught writing at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. While there she published a book, along with colleagues, on the communication practices of small organizations, Thinking Big. Staying Small. When she teamed up with Sue to write fiction, they sold a screenplay treatment to a Hollywood producer. Although the movie was never made, they used the seed money to found ThirtyNineStars, their publishing company. They also produced a second screenplay based on the life of a Waco schoolteacher who was imprisoned in World War I because of his German heritage and his work with early radio broadcasting. That screenplay, Wireless, was a finalist for the Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project in 2003. Sue Meredith Cleveland is an award-winning artist who has worked in multiple media including oil, watercolor, and fiber. Her earliest publications include articles advocating childbirth education and humanizing hospital care. Shrouded, a mystery Sue collaborated on with Dixie, was a finalist in the 2017 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Sue’s essays, literary memoir pieces, and short stories have been featured in award-winning literary journals, magazines, and blogs. Sue has written two pre-published Middle Grade novels: A Shadow Over Silver and Blue Water Over Dark Secrets.
Laura Oles’ debut mystery, Daughters of Bad Men, is an Agatha nominee, a Claymore Award finalist, and a Killer Nashville Readers’ Choice nominee. She is also a Writers’ League of Texas Award Finalist. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies, including Murder on Wheels, which won the Silver Falchion Award in 2016. She lives with her family in the Texas Hill Country.
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 Rinku Sen, author of The Accidental American and Stir It Up: Lessons on Community Organizing.
Rinku Sen is a writer and a political strategist. With over 30 years experience leading racial justice organizations in the United States, she has trained thousands of organizers, activists and agents of social change across the country. Rinku is currently Senior Strategist at Race Forward, having formerly served as Executive Director and as Publisher of their award-winning news site Colorlines. Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward has generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes. One example is the groundbreaking 2011 Shattered Families report, which changed the immigration debate with investigative research on how record deportations of parents were leading to the placement of thousands of children in foster care, often separating them permanently and legally from their families. Sen was the architect of Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets dropping the i-word, affecting millions of readers every day. Her books Stir it Up and The Accidental American theorize a model of community organizing that integrates a political analysis of race, gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other systems. A key advisor in the philanthropy world, Rinku has worked with foundations like Novo, Open Society, Nathan Cummings and Kellogg. She is a devoted board member of numerous social justice organizations including Hedgebrook, a residency that supports visionary women writers to help achieve a just and peaceful world; the Ms. Foundation for Women, a public foundation building women’s collective power for social, economic and reproductive justice; and the Advancement Project, a multiracial civil rights organization dedicated to eliminating structural racism through high impact policy change. She also serves on the board of Maven, the largest independent media coalition in North America. A highly sought-after keynote speaker for colleges, Sen has spoken at Harvard, Brown, University of Michigan, Penn State, and was the Commencement Speaker at Antioch New England. She is a James O. Gibson Innovation Fellow at PolicyLink.
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.
In association with VSA Texas (The State Organization on Arts and Disability) and the Pen2Paper Creative Writing Contest (a project of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities), we’re delighted to present an inclusive (mic-less) open mic for writers and musicians. Everyone is welcome to join us for this fun and friendly free evening suitable for performers of all ages and abilities.
Footage from previous Lion & Pirate open mic events can be seen here: http://bit.ly/1m7v4L8.
You’re invited to join us for the seventh Austin edition of the Why There Are Words reading series! This month’s readers are Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Bob Livingston, and Mary Helen Specht.
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.
Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of a memoir, two full-length poetry collections, and four chapbooks of poetry. Her novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War, has been named by Publisher’s Lunch/BuzzBooks as a book to watch. Her 2012 chapbook was one of two winners of the Red Ochre Press chapbook award, and her short fiction and poetry have been nominated for a storySouth Million Writers Award; the Pushcart Prize; and the Best of the Net compilation. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.
As a member of Austin’s legendary Lost Gonzo Band, Bob Livingston toured and recorded with such musical visionaries as Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Martin Murphey, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and many more. The singer-songwriter played an integral role in helping to create the music that first earned Austin the designation of “Live Music Capital of the World.” Traveling since the 80s as a Music Ambassador for the US State Department, he has taken Texas music as far afield as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Africa, Vietnam, and the Middle East, demonstrating again and again the unique power that music has to build bridges between peoples of the world. These tours earned him the honor of being appointed Ambassador of Goodwill by the State of Texas and Austin’s International Music Ambassador by the City of Austin. His last CD, Gypsy Alibi, released in 2011 on New Wilderness Records, won Album of the Year at the Texas Music Awards 2011, and he was inducted into Texas Music Legends Hall of Fame in 2016. While playing over 180 shows a year, he is also managing to write a memoir for Texas Tech Press, play with a multi-cultural band from Texas and India called Cowboys & Indians, and is in the final mix on a new album on Howlin’ Dog Records called Up The Flatland Stairs.
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 Fellow, she is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University. Texas Monthly has named her one of “Ten Writers to Watch.”
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 Ken Fontenot.
Ken Fontenot is a poet and novelist who lives in Austin. He is author of four books of poetry, including In a Kingdom of Birds, which was named 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. He has an MA in German from UT Austin and is currently putting together a book of his Collected Translations.
Get your cones ready for another round of Malvern Books’ FREE reading series, I SCREAM SOCIAL, hosted by Malvern’s own Annar Veröld and Schandra Madha. Featuring women-identified writers from the Austin community (and beyond!), this month’s I Screamers are Rachel Segura Elliott, Sarah Beach, and Aneesa Needel.
~7pm – Ice cream & Open Mic for women-identified and non-binary writers. We want a chance to hear everyone’s wonderful work, so please try to keep readings under 3 minutes.
~The featured reading begins after the open mic and will be followed by even more ice cream.
Can’t make it this time around? No worries. I Scream Social is every month ’til the end of time.
