Booksmith and The Bindery host a virtual event with Lucy Jane Bledsoe to celebrate the paperback edition of her new novel Lava Falls. She'll be in conversation with Christina Quintana (The Heart Wants) and Naomi J. Williams (Landfalls).

This is a free event, but RSVP is required.

The spirited, heart-driven people who populate these stories find surprising pockets of hope as they scrabble for ways to believe in themselves and the world. A woman returns to the Alaskan cabin of her survivalist childhood, full of misgivings and memories. A trip to Yellowstone sparks a crisis for a man who feels kinship with the wolves he glimpses there. Nursing painful pasts, sisters take a cruise together to Antarctica. A runaway finds salvation from violence in her own singing. And in the title novella, a Grand Canyon rafting expedition profoundly changes the lives of six women.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Evolution of Love, Lava Falls, and A Thin Bright Line, which the New York Times said, “triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.” Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, a Pushcart nomination, a Yaddo Fellowship, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Bledsoe lives in the Bay Area. More about Lucy here.

Christina Quintana (CQ) is a queer writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. CQ's plays and musicals have been developed and produced with companies including Barrington Stage Company, Southern Rep, INTAR, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Lark Play Development Center, Astoria Performing Arts Center, and the Alliance Theatre, among others. Her play Scissoring is available for licensing via Dramatists Play Service. Her poetry, fiction, and lyric nonfiction is published in Boudin: The Online Home of the McNeese Review, P.S. I Love You, PulpMag, OnCuba, Nimrod International Journal, Foglifter Journal, and beyond, and is forthcoming in great weather for MEDIA, and The Punch Magazine. Her poem "She-lium" was featured on Radiolab's "Elements" episode in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. More about CQ here.

Naomi J. Williams is the author of Landfalls (FSG 2015), long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award. Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, One Story, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review. Her distinctions include a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories Honorable Mention, Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, and residencies at Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and Willapa Bay AiR. Naomi was born in Japan and spoke no English until she was six years old. Educated at Princeton, Stanford, and UC Davis, today she makes her home in Sacramento, California. She has taught creative writing at UC Davis, Sacramento City College, and the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University in Ohio. She’s hard at work on new writing projects, including a novel about the early 20th-century Japanese poet Yosano Akiko. More about Naomi here.

This event is free, but RSVP is required.

To have a copy of Lava Falls by Lucy Jane Bledsoe sent to your door, order here.

To have a copy of The Heart Wants by Christina Quintana sent to your door, order here.

To have a copy of Landfalls by Naomi J. Williams sent to your door, order here.

You will have the option of adding any of the authors' books to your cart when you're completing registration for the event.