An Evening with J.P. Linstroth

Join us for an evening book signing with author J.P. Linstroth as we discuss his works, EPOCHAL RECKONINGS and SWIMMING IN BLUE SHADOWS.
About this Event

🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public, and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. Can't make the event? Buy your copy of and here.

About Epochal Reckonings

In Epochal Reckonings, poet, adjunct professor and editorial writer, J.P. Linstroth describes and responds to some of the crises of the first years of the 21st century. He aims, as he puts it, to cause concern, discussion, and surprise, as well as to evoke the emotions of anger, empathy, and sadness. The events covered include the huge migrations of people seeking to cross borders, whether in the Americas, Asia, Africa, the Middle-East or Europe, hoping for safety and a better life. Linstroth also shows and comments on human and natural acts of astonishing violence: the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York; the Hurricane named Katrina of 2005; the Haitian earthquake of 2010. Linstroth portrays man’s inhumanity to man, whether callous, careless, mistaken, or deliberate: the police-killings of African-American youths; the genocide of Brazilian indigenous peoples; the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib Pr*son; mass school-shootings in the USA; and the Yemeni civil war. Linstroth describes his poetry as emergent and inchoate, outlining the struggles and sufferings of various groups during major crises in the 21st century, embodied by racism, extremism, violence, and tragedies too many to be told. These poems capture such calamities, defining their symbolic significance for many of those who have experienced these disasters of our times across the globe.

About Swimming in Blue Shadows

Swimming in Blue Shadows is a collection of five short stories and ten poems on diverse subjects and styles, written over a number of years. Each story grew out the author’s personal experiences and in many ways represents a different phase of his life. The subjects of the short stories are: a wild boar hunt, a failed relationship, a Nahuatl flower seller, a bullfight, and a Belizean archaeology expedition. The poems, also, grew from personal experiences or centre on themes of particular interest to the author: AI (Artificial Intelligence), Afghanistan, COVID-19 (Coronavirus), Native Americans, love, depression, death, loss, and youthful exuberance. The title of the collection, a phrase from the first story in it, suggests the nearness of death in its innumerable and nebulous guises, pinpointing especially how the various protagonists face death, as if swimming in death’s blue shadows, hidden yet there.

About The Author

J. P. Linstroth has been writing since he was a little boy and currently resides in Florida of the United States. He has a PhD (D.Phil.) in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK with several awards for his research concentrating on the Spanish-Basques, Brazilian urban Amerindians, and Cuban, Haitian, and Guatemalan-Mayan immigrants in South Florida.

Linstroth’s poems have recently been featured in several volumes of the Mingled Voices Anthology (Proverse Publisher), and Line of Advance (LOA) an Online Military Literary Journal. At the moment, he is an Adjunct Professor at Palm Beach State College (PBSC) and the author of several books: Marching Against Gender Practice: Political Imaginings in the Basqueland (2015, Lexington Books); The Forgotten Shore (Poetic Matrix Press, 2017); Epochal Reckonings (Proverse Publishers HK, 2020, Winner of Proverse Prize 2019); Politics and Racism Beyond Nations: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Crises (2022, Palgrave Macmillan); and Swimming in Blue Shadows: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry (2022, Proverse Publishing, Proverse Supplemental Prize).

He has published several “opinion editorials” or “Op-Eds” in many newspapers and online news sources such as: CounterPunch, Des Moine Register, Euroscientist, L.A. Progressive, PeaceVoice, The Houston Chronicle, and Londonderry Sentinel, among others, on subjects as diverse as: Brazilian elections, BREXIT, conflict resolution, genocide in Western China, human biology, immigration rights, indigenous genocide, history, indigenous rights, international politics, political violence in Ireland, mass starvation in Yemen, racism, terrorism, cognition and neurology, peace and peacebuilding, primates and human behavior. His main academic research interests are: cognition, ethnonationalism, gender, genocide, history, immigrant advocacy, indigeneity, indigenous politics, indigenous rights, love, memory, minority rights, peace, peacebuilding, racism, social justice, terrorism, and trauma.