Event Details
Tuesday, April 8th
7:30pm
Featuring
Emily Raboteau
https://www.emilyraboteau.net/Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, public art, and parenthood. Her books are Lessons for Survival, shortlisted for a Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and an Anisfield-Wolf Award, Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor’s Daughter. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s distinctions include the Climate Narratives Prize, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Yaddo. She serves as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor in the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York (CUNY). She lives with her family in the Bronx.
Alexandra Chan
https://www.alexandrachan.com/Alexandra Chan is an archaeologist, an award-winning photographer, an author, and an artist, but this is the first time that all of her creative pursuits have come together into one lifetime project: her latest book, In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic. She continues to be an avid traveler and collector of “lucky nuts” and to walk, garden, paint, write, stitch, build, and dream herself into ever gentler and more creative ways of being alive and human. She lives with her husband, her two sons, and their menagerie of animals in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Vesna Jaksic
https://vesnajaksic.com/Vesna Jaksic Lowe has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Catapult, and Pigeon Pages as well as three anthologies—Back Where I Came From, and Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024 and 2023. She grew up in the former Yugoslavia, mostly writes about her immigrant experience, and runs the Immigrant Strong newsletter, which has been profiled by Longreads. She has attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Tin House workshops, and won the Parent-Fellow prize from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. A former newspaper reporter, she now works as a writer for nonprofit organizations in the human rights and social justice space.
Florence Wetzel
https://linktr.ee/FlorenceWetzelFlorence Wetzel was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, NY, and grew up in Westfield, NJ. Her latest book, Sara My Sara: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss, was published in July 2024. Her novels include the thriller The Woman Who Went Overboard and the Swedish mystery The Grand Man. She has also authored horror short stories, a book of poems and memoir essays, and co-authored jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson's autobiography.
Kristine Esser Slentz
https://kristineesserslentz.substack.com/Kristine Esser Slentz is a queer writer of Maltese descent, raised in the Chicagoland area. A cult escapee and GED holder, she is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and the forthcoming collection face-to-faces (ThirtyWest Publishing House, 2026). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, Five Points, TEDx, and elsewhere. Kristine is the co-founder, organizer, and host of Adverse Abstraction, a monthly experimental artist series in New York City’s East Village. She also produces and performs in Verse & Vision, a stage production currently in a micro-residency at NYC’s Dada and headed for an upcoming run at the IndyFringe Festival. Follow her art on Substack at Carnations & Car Crashes.
Reading List
Selected works by readers at this event.
