Reading Between the Wines | Poet Jillian Weise & Writer April Ayers Lawson

Join us on Thursday, November 21 at 6 p.m. for Reading Between the Wines with writers Jillian Weise and April Ayers Lawson!

Jillian Weise is a poet, performance artist and disability rights activist. Her first book The Amputee’s Guide to Sex was reissued in a 10th anniversary edition with a new preface. The Book of Goodbyes won the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions. Her speculative novel The Colony features Darwin, James Watson and Peter Singer.

Weise’s essays have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, The New York Times and Tin House. Her work has been anthologized in About Us, The Writer's Presence, The Manifesto Project, Disability Studies Reader, Please Excuse this Poem and elsewhere.

Praise for Cyborg Detective

“Jillian Weise is simply among the small league of my favorite poets on earth. With Cyborg Detective she’s even more so.” — Eileen Myles

“Populated with a variety of voices that speak with a sort of sly candor that can only be prompted by the most intimate inquiries, this book is a true ventriloquist act,” writes Cate Marvin.

April Ayers Lawson is the author of Virgin and Other Stories, which was named Best Book Of The Year by The Irish Times and Vice, and Best Foreign Book Of The Year by Spain’s Qué Leer Magazine.

April’s fiction has appeared in Paris Review, Granta, Die Welt, ZYZZYVA, and Oxford American, among others, and has been cited as notable in Best American Short Stories, featured by Huffington Post, and anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Der Spiegel, Granta, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung Magazine, and has been named a Most Popular Read Of The Year by Granta.

She teaches at Clemson University and at Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop.

Praise for Virgin and Other Stories

New York Times calls it "confident” and “unnerving" | Los Angeles Times says “filled with heart and breath and life" | NPR: "Against a background of suppressed passions and sublimation, Virgin And Other Stories zeroes in on the hard-won, highly charged moments of awakening in these conflicted lives" | Kirkus Review: "a meaty, satisfying tales of a substance that suggests Lawson would make a fine novelist."