BookSwell

10/07/2024

New BookSwell Intersections Podcast Episode 🎤🎤 Cody Sisco interviews Jessamyn Violet

Jessamyn Violet, author of Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar and musician, shares her musings on the power of creative inspiration, music, and more. In conversation with host Cody Sisco, Jessamyn discusses the rock and roll lifestyle, writing a true-to-life Hollywood coming-of-age novel, and the power of being an outsider.

https://www.bookswell.club/podcast/19-jessamyn-violet-interview/

***rbook

10/07/2024

Jessamyn Violet, author of Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar and musician, shares her musings on the power of music and more. In conversation with host Cody Sisco, Jessamyn discusses the rock and roll lifestyle, writing a true-to-life Hollywood coming-of-age novel, and the power of being an outsider.

02/07/2024

02/07/2024

Indie Author Night is here! Listen to author readings, meet the authors, and grab copies of their work TOMORROW, Tuesday, July 2, from 6-8 pm in the Main Library Community Room. 📚📖

Introducing the authors:
Courtney Deane has been a writer and pursuer of happily-ever-afters since she can remember. After both of her parents died, Deane worked to turn those tragedies into something beautiful—an effort that inspired her debut novel, “When Happily Ever After Fails.”

Chris Hill is a black American writer, engineer, swordsman, and pretty good ramen cook. Chris has written and published four illustrated books in the Rapture Burgers series. The latest book, a complete reboot of the series, drawn in partnership with a traditionally trained manga illustrator, was recently accepted into the Kyoto International Manga Museum.

Evan Baughfman is a Southern California playwright, author, and educator. A number of Evan’s plays are published through Heuer Publishing, YouthPLAYS, Next Stage Press, and Drama Notebook. Evan has also found success writing horror fiction, his work found recently in anthologies by No Bad Books Press, Critical Blast Publishing, and Black Hare Press.

Dana Hammer is a playwright, screenwriter, short story writer, and novelist. Her screenplay, “Red Wings,” has been optioned by EMA Films. Many of her short stories have been published in a variety of anthologies, magazines, and journals. Her plays have received several staged readings and full productions. She was a Writer in Residence at Hypatia in the Woods, in summer of 2022.

Come meet these amazing storytellers!📚📖

02/07/2024

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES by Julia Alvarez

From Algonquin Books:

Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.

Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma's characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo's abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

01/07/2024

HELL GATE BRIDGE: A MEMOIR by Barrie Miskin

Miskin's searing memoir about her experience with a mysterious mental illness during and after her pregnancy provides a haunting window into the state of health care in the United States." —Becky Meloan, The Washington Post

From Woodhall Press:

In the summer of 2016, Barrie Miskin faced a pivotal moment when her pregnancy prompted the discontinuation of a decade-long antidepressant regimen, setting off an unforeseen chain of events. By January 2017, she had become a stranger to her family and herself, navigating the complex and often unforgiving landscape of mental healthcare in the United States. Through encounters marked by compassion and cruelty, Barrie's family embarked on a desperate quest for a diagnosis, ultimately uncovering the rare condition of pregnancy-induced depersonalization and derealization disorder.

Hell Gate Bridge not only brings to light these seldom-discussed mental illnesses but also unveils the flaws in our maternal and mental healthcare system. Barrie's journey, marked by resilience, became a relentless climb out of the abyss, all while balancing the challenges of motherhood, maintaining her teaching career, and preserving her marriage. The narrative serves as a testament to the power of determination in overcoming the darkest of challenges and fighting fiercely to save those we hold dear.

29/06/2024

THE PROPHETS by Robert Jones Jr.

From G.P. Putnam's Sons:

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.
Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man--a fellow slave--seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony.

With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr., fiercely summons the voices of slaver and enslaved alike, from Isaiah and Samuel to the calculating slave master to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries--of ancestors and future generations to come--culminates in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets fearlessly reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.

28/06/2024

DANCES OF TIME AND TENDERNESS by Julian Carter

From Nightboat Books:

A cycle of stories linking q***r memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.

Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual account of what Julian Carter calls "the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds." With delicate drawings of chains linking the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to medieval catacombs, AIDS funerals, and Tennessee truckstops, Carter proposes intimacy as a technology of history. Here, historians and artists, students and lovers, sailors and skeletons join across deep time in a transgenderational lineage of q***r carnality as culture, inviting us to enter a gorgeously complex, formally precise choreography of sweetness, rage and sorrow--"this is not a memoir, it's collective memory."

27/06/2024

"A masterwork... mesmerizing... We come away troubled, unsettled—and in some subtle way changed."—The New York Times

From Riverhead Books:

A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning, visionary Akwaeke Emezi
One weekend.
The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city.
A party that goes awry.
A tangled web of s*x and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed.

Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive s*x party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian s*x workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city's corrupt and glittering underworld, they're all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.

25/06/2024

NAZAR BOY by Tarik Dobbs

"In their compelling debut Nazar Boy, Tarik Dobbs writes across and against the borders of race, class, ability, and s*xual orientation—the checkpoints wherein the body is scrutinized, surveilled, and othered in ways meant to define and contain. This book demands a reckoning—both personal and national. In the precise mirror of these poems we find both the darkness and its necessary illumination, a way to confront ourselves."
—Natasha Trethewey, author of The House of Being

"Nazar Boy (with its visual, lyrical, political, and spiritual ferocity) is one of the best debuts in recent memory. Do I mean spiritual? Yes, I feel the shape of my own soul when I read Tarik Dobbs’s work. From war and within war, with love and hammer, long hope and deep memory, Dobbs crafts a weapon of a book that will cut you deep and good. May this work ignite us towards freedom."
—Danez Smith, author of Homie

From Haymarket Books:

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.

Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, q***rness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.

24/06/2024

FAMILY MEAL by Bryan Washington

"A stunning look at what it really means to be family." --Michael Schaub, NPR

From Riverhead Books:

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?

When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, s*x, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.

23/06/2024

We are very grateful to Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera for her activism and advocacy on behalf of so many writers, and we are thrilled to be able to celebrate her debut novel! Join us in praising her!

BREAKING PATTERN by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera

"Adriana Elizabeth Herrera Bowen, a Latina living in Riverside California, is an eleventh grader who loves horses more than people. School is hard. She wants to win the All-Around Cowgirl saddle more than anything, but her parents make choices that disrupt her plans and force her to make drastic decisions."—Inlandia Institute

22/06/2024

Congratulations to Lane Igoudin for telling this moving story of a family fighting to stay together in the face of a range of challenges.

A FAMILY, MAYBE by Lane Igoudin

From Ooligan Press:

A gay couple's quest to adopt their foster kids in the early 2000s becomes a spiral of legal, political, and personal challenges.

In his candid and emotional memoir, Lane Igoudin shows the human side of public adoption as he and his partner Jonathan seek to adopt their foster daughters from the Los Angeles County child welfare system. Desperately wanting to be fathers, they enter into a complicated legal process that soon becomes a tangle of drama-filled birth parent visits and children's court hearings. Lane and Jon spend years not knowing whether they will be able to officially adopt the girls, or if the county will reunite the sisters with their birth mother, Jenna, a teenager in the state's custody herself.

The stress of the foster-to-adopt process, compounded with the mounting, nationwide struggle for LGBTQ+ equality, erodes the sense of peace in Lane and Jon's home. Still, the girls attach themselves deeply to their adoptive parents, while their dads do all they can to give them the best lives possible. Heartwarming moments with the kids and relatable first-time-parent woes become bittersweet as Lane realizes how much he and Jon have built--and how much they could lose. A Family, Maybe is a moving story about dedication, heartache, and love.

21/06/2024

Celebrate Pride month with Charles Jensen's memoir told through the lens of film genres.

“Equal parts memoir and film criticism, Splice of Life is a bruising coming of age, coming out, and coming into one’s own chronicle that rifles through everything from Mean Girls and Scream to Westworld and Black Swan to stress how formative filmgoing (and keen-eyed cinema analysis) can bleed into our own sense of self.” — Manuel Betancourt, author of The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men

SPLICE OF LIFE by Charles Jensen

From Santa Fe Writer's Project:
Movies and memory intersect in this compelling and unconventional memoir from q***r writer, film aficionado, and Jeopardy! contestant Charles Jensen. Splice of Life follows Jensen from his upbringing and struggles with s*xual awareness in rural Wisconsin to his s*xual liberation in college and, finally, to the complex relationships and bizarre coincidences of adulthood. Exploring what it means to be male and q***r, each essay splices together Jensen's lived experiences with his analysis of a single film. Deftly woven, Splice of Life shows us how personal and cultural memory intertwine, as well as how the stories we watch can help us understand the stories we all tell about ourselves.

20/06/2024

Congratulations to Hazel Kight Witham on the publication of her memoir-in-verse!

THE TRUTH ABOUT SECRETS by Hazel Kight Witham

From Strikethrough Press:

"Can I Ask You Something?"
It is 1987, and Hazel is in sixth grade.

Three things consume her: how to be Pretty when she’s not allowed makeup, how to be Cool when she’s just not, and somehow getting her crush to ask her out. Oh, and one more thing: keeping her biggest secret.

Today is supposed to be the day when her crush chooses between her and another girl. It’s supposed to be the day that she sneaks makeup to feel Pretty, and tries to find Cool somewhere in all her awkwardness. Instead, it’s the day that three girls approach her and say the words she didn't realize she was dreading: "Can I Ask You Something?"

As her close-held secret becomes kindling for middle school rumor-wildfire, Hazel is forced to confront not only the judgment of others, but her own feelings of shame.

From the initial confrontation to bathroom breakdowns to her surprising way of trying to take back control, we watch as Hazel not only tries to contain the flames of middle school gossip, but reconsiders her entire relationship with this secret she has guarded for so long.

She never realized how secrets and shame can transform into a strange kind of liberation. Threaded throughout the poems about this pivotal day are notes from the author on q***r theory and LGBTQIA+ history, things Hazel wished she’d known, so that her pride could have been buoyed by stories from a vast Rainbow Community.

20/06/2024

This is what we want from all our Pride events! A showcase of literary talents and q***r creatives.

We're having a party! Come join us June 23 for our Q***r Writers Festival!

Celebrate with us this Sunday, June 23, at our annual Q***r Writers Festival!!!! We are excited to share our Pride with you all

19/06/2024

Join us in celebrating Lynne Thompson's new book of poetry! 🥳 📘

BLUE ON A BLUE PALETTE by Lynne Thompson

"Lynne Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”—BOA Editions, Ltd.

13/06/2024

Join us next Wednesday June 19th at 7:00pm as we welcome activist and master noir stylist Gary Phillips discussing & signing his latest, 𝘈𝘴𝘩 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘢𝘴 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵.

13/06/2024

Join us for an evening of poetry THIS FRIDAY night exploring themes of love, s*x, and relationships in celebration of Hollie Hardy’s newly released poetry collection, Lions Like Us , published by Red Light Lit Press. Featuring readings by Jeffrey Bryant, Dennis Cruz, Natasha Dennerstein, Rich Ferguson, traci-kato-kiriyama, Rick Lupert, K.R. Morrison, Linda Ravenswood, and Dig Wayne. The evening will be hosted by poet Jennifer Lewis.

“In Lions Like Us, as the poet herself writes, “every poem is a love poem” — to others, and to the world itself. Reading this book is like falling in love, then parting, then returning to the beloved, again and again and again. Reader, enter to weep, to laugh, to find solidarity. Enter to find, in its purest, most intense, most direct and available form, poetry.”
~Matthew Zapruder, author of Story of a Poem and Father’s Day

Enjoy a reception before and after the readings.

Doors Open: 7:30 PM I Readings: 8:00 PM.

🆓 RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/red-light-lit-la-with-hollie-hardy-tickets-908595913837

13/06/2024

Please join me in supporting the LGBTQ+ Editors Association during Pride month. This is a our debut fundraising campaign and we hope you'll add us to your charitable contributions this Pride season.

Give by visiting https://punctuatepride.flipcause.com/

The LGBTQ+ Editors Association is a group of editors dedicated to making the publishing and communications industries more inclusive and welcoming.

As a nascent non-profit, we're seeking individual donations of $5, $10, $15 or more to help us reach our goal of $2,500 for our initial funding, which will go toward communications platforms that keep our community connected, website and hosting fees, and our fiscal sponsor's administrative expenses.

As the treasurer for the organization, I'm committed to the ethical and reasonable stewardship of funds and transparent and accountable communications with our members. We're at the start of a long journey and we look forward to your support in taking these first steps.

hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag +

Check out Punctuate Pride 2024 by the LGBTQ+ Editors Association!

02/05/2024

Join us TODAY at 2PM for the kickoff event at the Getty Center with poet, author, and peace advocate Mandy Kahn! RSVP here: LFLA.org/Garden-Poetry

The Poetry in the Garden is a unique series of live readings set among Robert Irwin’s Central Garden, featuring poetic voices of Los Angeles. Each week words will float through the landscape, encouraging guests to create their own experience: Rest on a bench, lay on a blanket on the lawn, admire the view, or wander the pathways among the blooming spring plants as poetry vibrates through the air.

Co-presented with the Getty Research Institute.

02/05/2024

Celebrate the diversity of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in Los Angeles at AAPI Joy, a free festival for all ages.

🗓️ Saturday, May 18
⏰ 11 am - 4 pm
📍 Central Library
🔗 LAPL.org/aapi-joy

From LUNAR NEW YEAR LOVE STORY by Gene Luen Yang, illustrated by LeUyen Pham. Text copyright ©️2024 by Humble Comics LLC. Illustrations ©️ 2024 by LeUyen Pham. Reprinted by permission of First Second, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership. All Rights Reserved.

02/05/2024

Congratulations!!! 🎉🥳

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