Booksmith and The Bindery are thrilled to host the virtual launch for Miah Jeffra's new story collection The Violence Almanac! They will be joined by Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Carson Ash Beker, Nancy Au, Jennifer Lewis and Tomas Moniz for a conversation about literary citizenship and languaging violence, moderated by Thea Matthews. There might also be a reading or two! Save the date and join us?

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order The Violence Almanac here.

About the book

In The Violence Almanac, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures.

An ostracized child yearns to be the hero for a rural community threatened by an escaped penitentiary inmate. An ambitious young writer receives mysterious film clips that thrust her and her boyfriend into a spiral of grief. A sex worker attempts to move on after her best friend is murdered by a john. A seismologist struggles to control his rage over a breakup that summons his internal racism. A biographer seeks to capture the truth of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children.

Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, The Violence Almanac vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.

About the authors

Miah Jeffra is author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), the chapbook The First Church of What's Happening (Nomadic 2017), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2021). Awards include the New Millennium Prize, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, Lambda Literary Fellowship, and 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Outstanding Anthology. Most recent work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, The North American Review, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, DIAGRAM, The Boiler, Litro, Barrelhouse, The Forge and Interim. Miah is a founding editor of Whiting Award-winning queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press. Photo by Sean Mikula.

Nancy Au's full-length collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, (September 2019, Acre Books), was a finalist for the 2020 CLMP Book Award for Fiction, and one of ten books longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Short Fiction Collection. She teaches at California State University Stanislaus, and is co-founder of The Escapery. Find out what she's up to by visiting www.peascarrots.com and www.TheEscapery.org.

Carson Ash Beker (they/them) is a hybrid storyteller and experience creator, co-founder of The Escapery Pirate Art Collective and Queer Cat Productions Theater Company. Their stories are upcoming or found in Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, Spunk, Foglifter, Gigantic Sequins, Home is Where you Queer Your Heart (Foglifter Press, 2021), and on ships and in cemeteries and on stages across the bay area. They are proud to be a Lambda writer, a Tin House scholar, a graduate of Clarion West, and an associate editor at Pseudopod. They can be found at CarsonBeker.com; QueerCatProductions.com and at www.Escapery.org. They heart Miah Jeffra's work so much. 

Jennifer Lewis is the editor of Red Light Lit. Her short story, "New Low," was the winner of the Nomadic Press Bindle Award in 2018. In June 2017, she was the 1st runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Creative Nonfiction Award for "Holy Communion." Her fiction has been published in Cosmonaut's Avenue, ENTROPY, Fourteen Hills Press, The Los Angeles Press, Midnight Breakfast, sPARKLE & bLINK, and X-Ray Lit Mag. She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University in May 2015 and was the recipient of the Leo Litwak Award for creative non-fiction in 2012 and for fiction in 2015. She teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco. 

Born and raised in San Francisco, California, Thea Matthews is a poet, author, and educator of Black Indigenous Mexican descent. She attained her BA in Sociology at UC Berkeley, where she studied and taught June Jordan’s program Poetry for the People led by Aya de Leon. Her debut poetry collection Unearth [The Flowers] was published June 2020 by Red Light Lit Press and is listed as part of the Best Indie Poetry of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. She has work in The New Republic, Atlanta Review, The Rumpus, and others. Currently, Thea Matthews is a MFA Poetry candidate at New York University. 

Tomas Moniz’s debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the LAMBDA, and the Foreward Indies Awards. He has two cats and 3 chickens. He also has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.

Baruch Porras Hernandez is the author of the chapbooks I Miss You, Delicate and Lovers of the Deep Fried Circle, both with Sibling Rivalry Press. He’s toured with the legendary Sister Spit Queer poetry tour, is a two-time winner of Literary Death Match, a regular host of literary shows for KQED, LitQuake, and was named a Writer to Watch in 2016 by 7x7 Magazine. He’s been featured in shows with RADAR Productions, The Rumpus, Writers with Drinks, and has performed several times at BusBoys and Poets in D.C.. He lives in San Francisco.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.