Writers' Lunch: Writing About Love and Loss in Relationships
Channel: Mechanics' Institute
Date: 2024-02-20

Join Mechanics' Institute for a discussion on the topic "Writing About Love and Loss in Relationships" with Lauren Alwan, Leslie Kirk Campbell, and Nona Caspers. This event was moderated by Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte.

The Writers' Lunch is a casual and virtual brown-bag lunch activity on the 3rd Friday of each month. Look forward to craft discussion, informal presentations on all forms of writing, and excellent conversation.

Join us, share, and learn! Visit us at www.milibrary.org/events for more information.

Lauren Alwan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who lives and works in the San Francisco East Bay. Her stories and personal essays examine bicultural identity, cultural inheritance, and intergenerational relationships in which attachment and belonging play a central role. Her short story, “An Amount of Discretion,” which looks at family relationships through a lens of grief and loss, first appeared in The Southern Review, and appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Her fiction has also appeared in ZYZZYVA, Nimrod, The Bellevue Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, and is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review. Her literary and personal essays have appeared in Catapult, The Millions, World Literature Today, Alta Journal, and A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home(ed. Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary). She is the recipient of a First Pages Prize from the de Groot Foundation, the Bellevue Literary Review's Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and a citation of Notable in Best American Essays. She is a prose editor at the museum of americana, an online literary review, and serves on the board of WTAW Press, a nonprofit independent publisher.

https://www.laurenalwan.com

Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Her collection is a 2022 Women’s National Book Association Great Group Reads Selection, a finalist for American Book Fest's 2022 Best Book Awards for Short Story, and a 2022 Foreword INDIES winner in short fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review, and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is the author of Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery (Riverhead, 1996) and has published feature personal essays in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Campbell is currently working on a second story collection, Free Radicals. She teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991.

https://lesliekirkcampbell.com

BUZZFEED listed Nona Caspers’ novel The Fifth Woman as a book queer women (and everyone else) should read. It was a LAMBDA finalist and Indie Book of the Year silver and bronze medalist in literary fiction and LGBTQ fiction. Her other books of fiction include Little Book of Days (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009) Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), which was awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and listed as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Caspers’ exquisite, quiet risk-taking writing find language for the trick of love and of daily existence itself—lovers are here and then gone, we are all here and then gone. She is also the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Best American Notable Short Story, and an Iowa Review Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Black Warrior Review, and The Sun. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at San Francisco State University and lives in the city where she wanders the neighborhoods with dog Bora.

https://www.nonacaspers.com

Award-winning author and Pushcart Prize nominee Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte is an Oakland multidisciplinary writer whose autobiographical and fictional short story collections, along with her lyrical and stunning poetry, artfully succeed in getting across deeper meanings about the politics of race and economics without breaking out of the narrative.  Her writing has been variously described as “rich in vivid imagery,” “incredible,” and “great contributions to literature.” Her first novel, Betrayal on the Bayou, was published in June 2020 and a poetry collection she has written with her daughter Dr. Angela M. Boutte, titled No Poetry No Peace™, was published in August 2020 and is the namesake of the No Poetry No Peace™ series at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. Her in progress novel first chapter, “The Burden Keeper,” was the 2021 fiction category winner for the San Francisco Writers Conference writing contest anthology. An inaugural Oakland Poet Laureate runner-up, she is also a popular teacher, literary reader, presenter, storyteller, curator, and emcee/host for literary and poetry events.

https://www.sheryljbize-boutte.com