Skylight Books Podcast Series

Words Uncaged Reading

​​"When I first visited California State Prison, Lancaster what I saw there were not prisoners, but cages filled of hundreds of lights —lights of knowledge, wisdom, compassion, love, insight and remorse.
​It was as if hundreds of candles had been locked in a distant closet, or that the stars had been hidden behind the blanket of the desert night, denying us the light that they had to shine upon the world." --Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy

Words Uncaged is a creative platform, created by the men of A-Yard California State Prison, Lancaster, and CalState LA professor Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy. Its purpose is for incarcerated artists, writers, students and poets to dialogue and critically engage with you. We invite you to experience our voices--uncaged from the prison walls. We invite you to rethink who incarcerated men are. We invite you to explore our common humanity together. We invite you to imagine alternatives to our current system of mass incarceration in the United States.

David Marlett, "AMERICAN RED"

The men and women of American Red are among the most fascinating in American history. When, at the dawn of the 20th century, the Idaho governor is assassinated, blame falls on “Big Bill” Haywood, the all-powerful, one-eyed boss of the Western Federation of Miners in Denver. Close by, his polio-crippled wife, Neva, struggles with her wavering faith, her love for another man, and her sister’s affair with her husband. New technologies accelerate American life, but justice lags behind. Private detectives, battling socialists and unions on behalf of wealthy capitalists, will do whatever it takes to see Haywood hanged. The scene is set for bloodshed, from Denver to Boise to San Francisco. America’s most famous attorney, Clarence Darrow, leads the defense—a philandering U.S. senator leads the prosecution—while the press, gunhands, and spies pour in. Among them are two idealists, Jack Garrett and Carla Capone—he a spy for the prosecution, she for the defense. Risking all, they discover truths about their employers, about themselves and each other, and what they’ll sacrifice for justice and honor—and for love.

David Marlett is an award-winning storyteller and writer of historical fiction, primarily historical legal thrillers bringing alive the fascinating people and events leading to major historical trials.

Evening of Poetry with Red Hen Press

Join Red Hen Press for an evening of poetry readings, featuring Eloise Klein Healy, Ron Koertge, Kim Dower, and Francesca Bell.

Claudia D. Hernández, "KNITTING THE FOG" w/ Josie Méndez-Negrete

Weaving together narrative essay and bilingual poetry, Knitting the Fog is the complex self-portrait of a young Chapina girl who wakes up to find her mother gone. When her mother returns three years later, they begin a month-long journey to El Norte.

Once settled in California, Claudia has trouble assimilating--she doesn't speak English, and her Spanish is "weird"--but when back in Guatemala, she is startled to find she no longer belongs there either. Claudia Hernández alternates between lyrical prose and poetry, English and Spanish, to tell the human story of one girl—her struggles, her triumphs, and her growing sense of self—as she navigates a turbulent world in the eighties and nineties. It is a story told in unforgettable vignettes, and is a vivid portrait of immigration, both specific to its time and as timely as ever.

Hernández is joined in conversation by Josie Méndez-Negrete, Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

SWITCHBLADE MAGAZINE: Live Reading

Join the writers of Switchblade Magazine, a quarterly noir fiction digest-sized magazine now going into its 10th issue, for a selection of readings. Readers include A.B. Patterson, Ashley Erwin, Andrew Miller, Jon Zalazny, Rex Weiner, Renee Asher Pickup, Lisa Douglass, Richard Risemberg, and Scotch Rutherford.

Darrel McLeod, "MAMASKATCH"

As a small boy in remote Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod is immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. There he is surrounded by her tales of joy and horror—of the strong men in their family, of her love for Darrel, and of the cruelty she and her sisters endured in residential school—as well as his many siblings and cousins, and the smells of moose stew and wild peppermint tea. And there young Darrel learns to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that will guide him throughout his life.

But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turns wild and unstable, and their home life becomes chaotic. Sweet and eager to please, Darrel struggles to maintain his grades and pursue interests in music and science while changing homes, witnessing domestic violence, caring for his younger siblings, and suffering abuse at the hands of his brother-in-law. Meanwhile, he begins to question and grapple with his sexual identity—a reckoning complicated by the repercussions of his abuse and his sibling’s own gender transition.

Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch—“It’s a wonder!” in Cree—is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next, and an uplifting story of one individual who overcame enormous obstacles in pursuit of a fulfilling and adventurous life.

PEN America: Emerging Voices Meet & Greet

PEN America presents the 2019 Emerging Voices Fellows, alumni, and mentors in conversation on the 2020 application cycle at Skylight Books.

The evening will include summer cocktails, short readings, a fellowship overview, and audience Q&A. Featuring Judy Choi, Anthony Hoang, Fajer Alexander Khansa, T.K. Lê, Dare Williams, and Fellowship Manager Amanda Fletcher.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "AS LONG AS THE GRASS GROWS"

In As Long As Grass Grows, author and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker argues that colonization was not just an invasion of and domination over Indigenous populations by European settlers, but that a central harm of colonization was the environmental injustices it imposed. Gilio-Whitaker traces this systemic dispossession of sacred land from Indigenous peoples from early colonization through today, arguing that it represents the greatest form of environmental injustice for Indigenous populations in the United States. 

Gilio-Whitaker traces how the new Red Power movement of the '70s and '80s, and other women-led movements for Indigenous environmental justice spurred cooperation between environmentalists, tribes, and the government. In 1991, the People of Color Environmental Justice Theory Leadership Summit produced the Principles of Environmental Justice with seventeen points that represented a greater level of inclusion for Indigenous concerns than the preceding studies had, framing environmental justice in terms of colonial histories and oppressive political domination.

Mona Awad, "BUNNY" w/ Anna Joy Springer

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. 

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon,” and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, a caustic art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunny cult and starts to take part in their ritualistic off-campus “Workshop” where they magically conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision. 

A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author whose work has been described as “honest, searing and necessary” (Elle).

Author Mona Awad is in conversation with cross-genre writer Anna Joy Springer.

Ariana Reines, "A SAND BOOK"

Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to Sandy Hook to Hurricane Sandy to Sandra Bland, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning. In her long-anticipated follow-up to Mercury, Ariana Reines has written her most ambitious, visceral, and satisfying work to date. 

Ocean Vuong, "ON EARTH WE'RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS" w/ Jade Chang

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.  With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

Vuong is in conversation with Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World.

James Ellroy, "THIS STORM"

It is January, 1942. Torrential rainstorms hit L.A. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops rate it a routine dead-man job. They're grievously wrong. It's a summons to misalliance and all the spoils of a brand-new war.

Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, caught up in the maelstrom of the Japanese internment. Dudley Smith is an LAPD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way Fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core. They've signed on for the dead-man job. They've got a hot date with History. They will fight their inner wars within The War with unstoppable fury.

Alex Espinoza, "CRUISING" w/ David Francis

Combining historical research and oral history with his own personal experience, Alex Espinoza examines the political and cultural forces behind this radical pastime. From Greek antiquity to the notorious Molly houses of 18th century England, the raucous 1970s to the algorithms of Grindr, Oscar Wilde to George Michael, Cruising remains at once a reclamation of public space and the creation of its own unique locale—one in which men of all races and classes interact, even in the shadow of repressive governments. In Uganda and Russia, we meet activists for whom cruising can be a matter of life and death; while in the West he shows how cruising circumvents the inequalities and abuses of power that plague heterosexual encounters. Ultimately, Espinoza illustrates how cruising functions as a powerful rebuke to patriarchy and capitalism—unless you are cruising the department store restroom, of course.

Espinoza is in conversation with David Francis, author of The Great Inland Sea.

Sarah Gailey, "MAGIC FOR LIARS" w/ Mallory O'Meara

Mix the sly, coming-of-age elements of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians with the noir and edge of Jessica Jones, shake well, and serve over ice to get Magic for Liars, the debut novel from Hugo Award nominee and debut author Sarah Gailey.

Magic for Liars channels the flushed, youthful intensity of Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me with a school for mages, hidden in the hills of southern California, as its backdrop. Ivy Gamble, a disagreeable and non-magical private investigator with a slight drinking problem, works to solve a murder at a school for mages where her estranged (and very magically talented) sister teaches. The dark and fantastic secrets she uncovers not only shed a stark light on her case, but on her own family history and the life she could have had.

Gailey is in conversation with Mallory O'Meara, bestselling author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon, among with being a screenwriter and film producer.

Ted Chiang, "EXHALATION"

From the acclaimed author of Stories of Your Life and Others—the basis for the Academy Award –nominated film Arrival—comes a groundbreaking new collection of short fiction: nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories. These are tales that tackle some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only Ted Chiang could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.