We are beyond excited to host our first in-person author reading since March 2020!! The event will be held outdoors and the location is TBA so please stay tuned!
Join us as we welcome two amazing authors, Adrian Shirk, who will read from her new collection of essays HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON EARTH: SEARCHING FOR AN AMERICAN UTOPIA (Counterpoint, March 2022) and Anne Elizabeth Moore who will read from her new memoir GENTRIFIER (Catapult, Oct. 2021). Shirk and Moore will read from their new works, followed by a conversation, and a Q&A portion with you!
ABOUT HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON EARTH
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial’s quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism.
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.
When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward.
Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
ABOUT ADRIAN SHIRK
Adrian Shirk is an essayist and memoirist. She is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, named an NPR Best Book of 2017. Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She is a frequent contributor to Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic and Atlas Obscura, among other publications. Currently, she teaches in Pratt Institute’s BFA creative writing program and lives at the Mutual Aid Society in the Catskill Mountains.
ABOUT GENTRIFIER
Taking on the thorny ethics of owning and selling property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood with both intelligence and humor, this memoir brings a new perspective to a Detroit that finds itself perpetually on the brink of revitalization.
In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house—a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf—in Detroit’s majority-Bangladeshi “Banglatown.” Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to the bungalow in her new city where she gardens, befriends the neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption.
This is also a memoir of art, gender, work, and survival. Moore writes into the gaps of Woolf’s declaration that “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write”; what if this woman were queer and living with chronic illness, as Moore is, or a South Asian immigrant, like Moore’s neighbors? And what if her primary coping mechanism was jokes?
Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricably linked with victory.
ABOUT ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE
Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, South Dakota. She has written several critically acclaimed nonfiction books, including the Lambda Literary Award–nominated Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2017, and the Eisner Award-winning Sweet Little Cunt. Her latest book Gentrifier: A Memoir is an NPR Best Book of 2021. She lives in Delaware County, New York, with her cat, Captain America.