The Writer’s Center welcomes writer and  Writer’s Center Emerging Writer Fellowship awardee Matthew Pitt for a reading of his debut novel, Tear Here. Matthew is in conversation with poet Monica Prince. FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.

Matthew Pitt is the author of the novel Tear Here and two collections of short fiction: These Are Our Demands and Attention Please Now. A novella, The Be-Everything! Brothers, is forthcoming in late 2026. Individual works appear in Cincinnati Review, Conjunctions, EPOCH, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, Oxford American, Story, and The Southern Review. Raised in St. Louis, he now operates out of Fort Worth, where he is an associate professor of Creative Writing at TCU.

Monica Prince, associate professor of activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University, is a Guyanese American poet that writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the country. Her poetry and essays appear or are forthcoming in national and international literary journals, and her published choreopoems include Roadmap: A Choreopoem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and FORCE, releasing in January 2026. She shares her life with her husband, polycule, and three disrespectful cats.

About Tear Here

Reflects on the dark rise and fall of an ambitious rock music collective in the upper Midwest.

Matthew Pitt’s first novel draws from characters introduced in his debut story collection. The rock band Some Assault—comprised of dropouts and hedonists—flails from gig to gig, directed by their volatile drummer Liddy, who careens between foster homes and addictions. She and the band strike up a surprise friendship with Charlie Shales, their remedial algebra teacher. At first, this link is transactional, with Shales seeking drugs and the band seeking a customer. Before long, an odd and meaningful bond is formed.

When Charlie later passes, Liddy orchestrates an elaborate sonic empire, dismissing her own health woes. She recruits new members with targeted zeal, including Oliv, heiress to twin fortunes in condiment packaging and shortbread cookies. Deploying Oliv’s funds to buy a shuttered women’s prison, Some Assault converts the acreage into a farm collective and a massive recording studio dubbed The Hive.

Misfits continue to swell Some Assault’s roster, lured by The Hive’s promise of security and rabid praise: Andy Warhol’s Factory in an Instagram age. However, once the band’s fifteen minutes of fame threaten to expire, territorial violence rises, driven by dark desires to command the public eye at all costs. Chronicled by a member who managed to flee The Hive, Tear Here surveys the fierce fallout of cravings for celebrity that warp into cultish conduct.

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