Writers & Books

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Photo Credit: Asa Shutts Buy A Lady’s Formula for Love at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   A Lady’s Formula for Love is  Elizabeth Everett’s first novel, inspired by her admiration for rule breakers and belief in the power of love to change the world. She lives in upstate New York with her family near sites that figure prominently in the history of civil rights…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy James Whorton’s novels Approximately Heaven, Frankland, and Angela Sloan at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   "Angela Sloan is a dazzler...the novel never loses its place, the destination is clear, and even the human absurdity is believable under Whorton's talented authority. Whorton has masterfully juggled questing oddballs before, in his two previous novels Approximately Heaven and Frankland..." —Matt Baker, Oxford American   James…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Katherine Hastings is the author of three collections from Spuyten Duyvil Press: Shakespeare & Stein Walk Into a Bar (2016), Nighthawks (2014), and Cloud Fire (2012), as well as several chapbooks. Poet laureate emerita of Sonoma County, CA, she edited Know Me Here: An Anthology of Poetry by Women; Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County; and What Redwoods Know: Poems from California…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy If This Is the Age We End Discovery at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   "This phenomenon of a book launches me with its wonder into space and the multiverse and then somehow discovers compassion where we might expect to find only absence of heat or light. Ben-Oni rides with and wrestles the horse of theory to the event horizon's brink, and at…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy Aftershocks at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks is a deeply felt memoir about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.    Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. The instability wrought by her…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy Who’s Your Daddy at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   A lyrical, genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father.    “In these crisply narrative poems, which unreel like heart-wrenching fragments of film, Arisa White not only names that gaping chasm between father…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy Bestiary at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   K-Ming Chang will be in conversation with Kaelyn Rich, author of Girls Resist!   One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. Soon afterward, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. As more mysterious events follow, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Buy Raising a Rare Girl at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   Award-winning writer Heather Lanier’s memoir about raising a child with a rare syndrome, defying the tyranny of normal, and embracing parenthood as a spiritual practice that breaks us open in the best of ways.   “Lanier’s memoir is now on the short list of books I’ll give, when the time comes, to my…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Despite her parents’ struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Negative Space explores Dancyger’s anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness that was hidden from her.   "This book is so many things:…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy Strike the Hammer at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   On July 24, 1964, chaos erupted in Rochester, NY. Strike the Hammer examines the unrest—rebellion by the city's Black community, rampant police brutality—that would radically change the trajectory of the Civil Rights movement. Laura Warren Hill examines Rochester's long Civil Rights history and, drawing extensively on oral accounts of the northern, urban community,…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended.   “A lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy All the Morning Crows at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   “Untranslatable and mysterious as any mythology, a various history of a changeable self accumulates in these inventive, charged, and often ecstatic poems.”--Cleopatra Mathis   Meg Kearney’s most recent poetry collection, All Morning the Crows, is the winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. The author of The Ice Storm, Home By…