We are thrilled to welcome Rita Bullwinkel to Twenty Stories in celebration of her debut novel Headshot, out March 12th via Viking! Rita will be joined in reading and conversation by local author Rebekah Bergman, as well as performances by musician and writer Nat Baldwin and writer Murphy Chang, followed by an audience Q&A. Please join us!
ABOUT HEADSHOT
An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family's unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors' pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.
Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.
ABOUT RITA BULLWINKEL
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot (2024) and Belly Up, which garnered a 2022 Whiting Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in Tin House, the White Review, ZYZZYVA, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her work has been translated into Italian, Greek, and Dutch. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s, the Deputy Editor of The Believer, a Contributing Editor for NOON, and the creator of Oral Florist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building.
ABOUT REBEKAH BERGMAN
Rebekah Bergman's novel The Museum of Human History (Tin House, 2023) was named a best debut of the year by Kirkus Reviews and Booklist and a best book of summer by WIRED. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Poets & Writers, Joyland, and other publications. Rebekah lives in Rhode Island with her family.
ABOUT NAT BALDWIN
Nat Baldwin is a musician and writer from Maine living in Western Mass. He's released numerous solo and collaborative works and runs the experimental music label Tripticks Tapes. His debut collection of short fiction The Red Barn was published in 2017 by Calamari Archive.
ABOUT MURPHY CHANG
Murphy Chang thinks on the structure and malleability of language as material. Her work often takes on a written and/or visual form and has been “shown" both nationally and internationally. Murphy is a human who cares little for the boundaries between disciplines and holds a BFA in studio art from the Rhode Island School of Design as well as an MFA in literary arts from Brown University. She sincerely hopes her work never takes on a publishable form.