Join us as we celebrate the newly released anthology I Know What’s Best For You: Stories On Reproductive Freedom edited by Shelly Oria and out from McSweeney’s. The event will include readings from anthology contributors and guest readers alike, all reading pieces from the anthology as well as pieces of their own work related to reproductive freedom.
At the reading, words will be shared by Shelly Oria, Charlotte Abotsi, Mary-Kim Arnold, Alison Espach, and Krysten Hill. The event will end with a Q&A portion with Shelly and her guests! We hope to see you there!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus, Writings from the MeToo Movement (McSweeney's 2019), as well as the forthcoming I Know What's Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom (McSweeney's 2022). Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, received a number of awards, and been translated to several languages.
Alison Espach is the author of the novels Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance and The Adults, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Barnes and Noble Discover pick. Her short story series In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People is an Audible Original and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Vogue, Joyland, and other places. She teaches creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.
Charlotte Abotsi is a writer, educator, and filmmaker from Providence, Rhode Island. As a spoken word poet, she has competed in several international poetry slams, placing in the top 20 poets at the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam, and winning the 2017 Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam competition; her work has been written about in HuffPost and Mic.com. As a filmmaker, Abotsi has focused on documentary film, debuting her short documentary Process at the 2018 Ocean State Film Festival. She has received fellowships from the Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, Tin House, DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, AIR Serenbe, and Define American. She curates the poetry-based web series Ours Poetica for The Poetry Foundation.
Mary-Kim Arnold is a writer, artist, and teacher. She is the author of The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press). Other writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Mary-Kim teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University. Awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship, MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and a Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She serves as Senior Editor for Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts at Tupelo Quarterly.
Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured and forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, B O D Y, Boiler Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Muzzle, PANK,Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, she received her MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Boston, where she currently teaches.