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Join The Georgia Review and Lostintheletters for a poetry reading not to be missed.

Brandon Som will read from his 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Tripas, whose poems are built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in celebration of his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store.

Siwar Masannat will read from cue, an ekphrastic collection that responds to artist Akram Zaatari’s excavation of studio portraits by Hashem El Madani, captured between the 1940s and 1970s in the Lebanese town of Saida. cue’s intertextual experiments and lyric poems pose questions about privacy and visibility, love and family, gender, and ecological agency. This reading will be part of the Asian American Literature Festival, a festival running in September with coordinated events happening across the world.

Brandon Som’s Tripas was also a finalist for the National Book Award. His first book, The Tribute Horse, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives on the unceded land of the Kumeyaay Nation and is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego.

Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer. 50 Water Dreams, her debut poetry collection, was selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Competition. Managing editor of the African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner, Masannat currently works at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Most recently, Masannat’s writing appeared in Mïtra: Revue d’art et de littérature, 7iber, Fence, and Lana Turner, among others.

MAGGIE NYE

& KENDALL PAKULA

Saturday, July 27 6:00-8:00 PM @ WhiteSpace Gallery

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Lostintheletters is thrilled to celebrate Maggie Nye's debut novel The Curators (Nortwestern University Press, 2024) with readings from Maggie Nye and Kendall Pakula!

More about the featured authors:

Maggie Nye is an author, teacher, and editor living in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and nonfiction editor at Southeast Review. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans School Writer in Residence program. Her writing interests include: adaptation, myth, ritual, girlhood, body horror, race and otherness, language-magic, and monstrosity. Her debut novel, The Curators (Northwestern University Press), involves a golem, a girl gang, and a dark chapter in Atlanta’s history.

Kendall Pakula is a poet and Content Strategist based in Atlanta, GA. Her work has been featured in burntdistrict, Blue Lyra Review, Folklore Review, and Crosswinds Poetry Journal. She is one of three winning poets in the 2024 Crosswinds Poetry Contest.

Needful Voices:

Experiments in Writing the Collective

a workshop with Maggie Nye

Saturday, July 27 1:00-3:00 PM @ Art Papers Office

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About the workshop:

Narrative perspective constructs the way we see a story. Changes in perspective can create sympathy, animus, shift blame, open pathways toward new understandings or complicate our existing understandings, and offer viewpoints (high, low, internal, external, other, nonhuman, and multiple) we rarely—or perhaps never—consider.

In this generative workshop, we’ll focus on the multiple. We will consider the capacities of writing from within the we. This narrative form is especially useful for rendering the dismissed desires of disempowered or overlooked bodies loud and gushing. But it is also a perspective of inherent vulnerability because the individual cedes control to the many.

In this workshop, we will read, dissect, construct, speak (write), and amplify the voices of collective desire.

About Maggie Nye:

Maggie Nye is an author, teacher, and editor living in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and nonfiction editor at Southeast Review. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans School Writer in Residence program. Her writing interests include: adaptation, myth, ritual, girlhood, body horror, race and otherness, language-magic, and monstrosity. Her debut novel, The Curators (Northwestern University Press), involves a golem, a girl gang, and a dark chapter in Atlanta’s history.

Joyelle McSweeney

Carrie Lorig

& Steven Duong

+ Film Screening

Saturday, April 6, 6:00-8:00 PM @ WhiteSpace Gallery

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Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the recently released Death Styles (Nightboat, 2024), as well as nine other books of poetry, drama, fiction, criticism and translation, including The Necropastoral, an influential work of goth ecopoetics. McSweeney's previous title, Toxicon and Arachne,was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and won the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. A co-founder of the international press Action Books, McSweeney teaches at Notre Dame, and lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Carrie Lorig is the author of The Pulp vs. the Throne (2015, Artifice Books) and The Blood Barn (2019, Inside the Castle). Chapbooks include The Book of Repulsive Women (Essay Press), NODS. (Magic Helicopter Press), Reading as Wildflower Activist, and several collaborative chapbooks, including Labor Day (Forklift, Ohio) w/ Nick Sturm and rootpoems (Radioactive Moat) with Never Angeline Nørth. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in School Psychology at Georgia State University.

Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego. His poems appear in The American Poetry Review, The New England Review, and Guernica, while his essays and short fiction appear in Astra Magazine, Catapult and The Drift. Having graduated from the University of Iowa with an MFA in fiction writing, he is the current 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. His debut poetry collection, At the End of the World There is a Pond, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2025. To trace his online footprint, follow him either here (stevenduongwrites.com) or here (Twitter: @boneless_koi).

A year of innovative film released in 12 monthly installments, Good Symptom troubles the boundaries between cinematic and literary forms. The 3rd Thing’s first time-based publication showcases literary media arts experiments that push the language of poetry, essay, correspondence, autobiography, manifestos, thought pieces and hybrid literary works off the page and onto the screen. Every month, subscribers to this series enter a world that disregards genre and disturbs disciplinary lines between literary and media arts with 1-4 short films and accompanying critical essays by project curators and guest writers.

Saturday, April 6, 1:00-3:00 PM EST

Hyperdiction: A Generative Writing Workshop with Joyelle McSweeney

@ Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia

Sliding Scale Tickets

About the workshop:

Let’s investigate the premise and promise of hyperdiction, an intensive use of language rife with political and aesthetic possibility. Hyperdiction is a vivid, viscous soundprint, an uncanny sonic ecology; it is an assemblage of the voices, sounds, dictions, languages, lingos, terminologies, and slangs a person encounters in their experience of life, art, dream, ghost, family, community, region, work, subculture, the state, studies, etc. Through guided writing and listening, participants will bring into audibility their own hyperdictions, then investigate the aesthetic and political possibilities of hyperdiction for dream terrains and ecologies, translation and performance, among other cosmic and lyric endeavors.

About Joyelle McSweeney:

Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the recently released Death Styles (Nightboat, 2024), as well as nine other books of poetry, drama, fiction, criticism and translation, including The Necropastoral, an influential work of goth ecopoetics. McSweeney's previous title, Toxicon and Arachne,was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and won the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. A co-founder of the international press Action Books, McSweeney teaches at Notre Dame, and lives in South Bend, Indiana.