The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of writing! We’re joined by fiction writer Hannah Grieco and poet Alina Stefanescu for a cross-genre discussion about their new collections.
RSVP below to receive login information (our virtual events are held via Zoom). FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern.
We encourage you to order the books from your local, independent bookseller or online from the publishers.
Hannah Grieco‘s debut short story collection First Kicking, Then Not comes out August 12th from Stanchion. She teaches writing at Marymount University and writes a literary column for Washington City Paper. Read more of her work in The Washington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Brevity, Wigleaf, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her online at hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. She would be elated if you ordered My Heresies, her new poetry collection from Sarabande. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.
About First Kicking, Then Not
A young woman transforms after an unspeakable loss. A recent divorcee discovers a new life. An aging mother fears losing everything she loves, while another abandons her children at Starbucks. First Kicking, Then Not introduces these women and many more, all of whom are hungry to know who they are outside the expectations of others. Hannah Grieco’s captivating debut fiction collection acts as a mirror: Who looks back? Who do you want to see?
About My Heresies
Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu’s poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush, at other times stark and shocking. My Heresies probes the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and the result is a hauntological mapping of life, love, family, and womanhood.
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