10/24: Author Reading with Chad Anderson, Scott Beal & Rebecca Biber!

Join us at Booksweet for readings from Chad Anderson, Scott Beal and Rebecca Biber! We'll have refreshments and a rousing discussion with our authors. You may want to arrive at 10 til, as we expect a large crowd for this one!

About the Authors

Chad B. Anderson is the author of We Are All But Fumbling Creatures, his debut short story collection (September '26). His work has appeared in Salamander Review, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Best American Short Stories 2017, Clockhouse, Burrow Press Review, and Callaloo. He curated and edited What’s Mine of Wilderness, a collection of poetry, prose, and art, published by Burrow Press in 2023. He has attended residencies at the Carolyn Moore Writers House in Portland, Oregon (Fall 2022), the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida (Winter 2018-2019), and Art Omi: Writers in Ghent, New York (formerly the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, Summer 2009). He has served as production editor and co-managing editor for Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, a guest editor for Burrow Press Review, and an associate fiction editor for Orison Books. Born and raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he earned his B.A. in American Studies and English from the University of Virginia and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where he served as fiction editor for Indiana Review. He lives in Michigan with 30 houseplants and counting.

Scott Beal is the author of Stegosaurus Moon (Dzanc Books, 2026) and Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014), as well as the chapbook The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in journals such as Rattle, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and have received awards including a Pushcart Prize. He directs the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts at the University of Michigan and teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing. He co-hosts the Skazat! online poetry series and co-edits the literary journal Public School Poetry. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Rebecca Biber is a music educator, collaborative pianist, and poet. After earning her BM and MM from the University of Michigan School of Music, she completed her MFA in creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte. Her first book of poems, Technical Solace, was published by Fifth Avenue Press in 2017. She lives in Ann Arbor.

About the Books

We Are All But Fumbling Creatures is a roaming journey through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley across time. From an unlikely band of runaways fleeing slavery, to a fractured family searching for answers amid a climate-ravaged future, Chad B. Anderson’s debut collection entwines short stories with mixed media artworks by Jeffrey D. Guinn. Inspired by the Southern Gothic tradition, We Are All But Fumbling Creatures explores the tangled impacts of history, geography, trauma, and the natural world on who we become and what we pass down.

Guinn’s assemblages – created from wood scraps, dirt, animal bones, and other detritus gathered throughout the Shenandoah Valley – contain their own stories that complement and converse with Anderson’s motifs of haunting echoes, half-buried truths, and the ghosts we carry even if we do not name them.

Stegosaurus Moon explores heartbreak, divorce, parenthood and the discovery of new, often unexpected, ways forward. Poem by poem, the speakers puzzle through how one love comes apart and how a new life comes together in its wake. Through encounters with everything from dinosaurs and scorpionflies, Britney Spears and the Rock, birthdays, deaths, pets, teenagers, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Rupaul’s Drag Race, the sequence builds into an examination of how the language of queer identity can be weaponized or can open space for more expansive ways to live and love.

Escapement is Rebecca G. Biber's second full-length poetry book and winner of the 2025 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award. A thoughtful, moving, and even thrilling collection that is a joy to read. Biber's lines are persuasive and elegant, yet grounded in the familiar. She weaves humor and devastation structured around the abiding metaphor of music. A book to relish and reread.