Join us via Zoom to celebrate the launch of Alex Z. Salinas’ new short story collection, City Lights From the Upside Down. With guest Harold Whit Williams, who will share poems and songs, and a short story from Mel Bay’s Book of the Dead.

In City Lights From the Upside Down, Alex Z. Salinas’ debut collection of short stories, the setting is mostly South Texas—and, infrequently, outer space. Mothers dying or dead, brothers with a taste for revenge, bizarre coffee shop encounters, terrifying dreams, strange alien lights, embers of love blazing and cooling-in these stories, a lot happens and, sometimes, not much at all. Through precise, raw, and often Christ-haunted language, Salinas builds up characters to bring them to their knees. This book: a roller coaster in the middle of the Texas desert. (Or is it just a mirage?)

Alex Z. Salinas is the author of poetry collections WARBLES and DREAMT, or The Lingering Phantoms of Equinox. He’s also the author of a book of stories, City Lights From the Upside Down. He holds an M.A. in English Literature and Language from St. Mary’s University, and lives in San Antonio, Texas.

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

Zoom Information:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85153207722?pwd=cmtqS04rT2FhaFlXWVZ4elVGSGFuQT09

Meeting ID: 851 5320 7722
Passcode: 420598