A Reading with Juliet Escoria, Mesha Maren & Austyn Wohlers

Registration for this event is not required; however, in the case of a full event, your registration will reserve your seat.

Juliet Escoria, Mesha Maren and Austyn Wohlers join us in Remington to read from and discuss their new books, You Are the Snake (Escoria), Shae (Maren) and Hothouse Bloom (Wohlers, coming August 2025).
ABOUT YOU ARE THE SNAKE

From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura van den Berg
In You Are the Snake, we peer into the life of a community college student, the life of an abusive grandmother is imagined, and a young woman takes up gardening. Escoria’s characters are trying their best, or they aren’t, as they bump against the boundaries of society’s expectations.
Exploiting the form of the short story in a voice entirely her own, You Are the Snake resists easy moralizing by subverting our expectations of how narrative functions. While Escoria plumbs the depth of girlhood and new womanhood, she leaves room for oddness, impulse, and yearning. Each story contains its own world, be it the suburbs of California or the mountains of West Virginia, but taken as a whole, this collection is expanding and challenging, corrupting expectations about what women can be and what they can write.
Juliet Escoria’s writing has been called “vivid,” “fantastic,” “sharp,” and “singularly honest,” and this collection delivers the “charged eloquence” of her previous work, in addition to the maturity and style of a new format—the short story—which is a dream fit for her “electricity that pulsates from within the prose.”

You Are the Snake is available for purchase at greedyreads.com!
Juliet Escoria is the author of the novel Juliet the Maniac (Melville House, May 2019), which was named a "best of" book by Nylon, Elle, Buzzfeed, and others, and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. She also wrote the poetry collection Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press, 2016) and the story collection Black Cloud (CCM/Emily Books, 2014), which were both listed in various best of the year roundups. Her writing can be found in places like Prelude, VICE, The Fader, BOMB, and the New York Times, and has been translated into many languages. She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia, where she teaches English at a community college.

About SHAE

From “a highest-order storyteller of Southern noir” (Electric Literature), a queer coming-of-age novel about addiction, belonging, and loving a place that doesn't always love you back.

When sixteen-year-old Shae meets Cam, who is new to their small town in West Virginia, she thinks she has found someone who is everything she has ever wanted in a companion. The two become fast friends, and then more. And when Shae ends up pregnant, Cam begins a different transition—trying on clothes that Shae can no longer fit into and using female pronouns. Shae tries to be fully supportive as Cam becomes the person she wants and needs to be.

After a traumatic C-section and the birth of their daughter, Eva, Shae is given opioids to manage the intense pain. During the first year of Eva’s life, Shae’s dependence shifts from pain management to addiction, and her days begin to revolve around getting more pills. In the heart of West Virginia, opioids are dispensed as freely as candy, and Shae is just one of many to fall victim to addiction. Meanwhile, as Cam continues to transition, she embraces new relationships and faces the reality of being a trans woman in rural America.

Shae is as much about these two young women as it is about the home they both love despite its limitations. Following the acclaimed Sugar Run and Perpetual West, this is Mesha Maren’s most intense and intimate novel yet.

Shae is available for purchase at greedyreads.com!

Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run and Perpetual West (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.
ABOUT HOTHOUSE BLOOM
In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, HOTHOUSE BLOOM follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard and is both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world.
Houthouse Bloom will be published in August 2025.
Austyn Wohlers is from Atlanta and lives in Baltimore, where she runs the Near Future reading series and plays in the band Tomato Flower. Her writing has previously appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Guernica, Asymptote, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been supported by Tin House and Sewanee. In 2022, she was the winner of the University of Notre Dame's Sparks Prize Fellowship, selected by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint. Hothouse Bloom is her first novel.

Host or Publisher Greedy Reads