Author Event! Dixa Ashariel Ramirez's "Mist"

Join us on May 14th at 6pm as we host Dixa Ashariel Ramirez in conversation with Anya Lewis-Meeks to discuss her new novel, Mist. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase!

About the Book:

It is 2019 and Josefina Pujols, an overachieving professor going up for tenure at Tanner University (“The Ninth Ivy”), watches in dismay as social media popularity threatens to take over the academic standards she had been rigorously trained to uphold. Online shopping, group chat, and an alcohol problem palliate her encounters with an inbox full of increasingly ludicrous requests from her colleagues.

When Doralis Montero, who had mysteriously quit her prestigious professorship two years earlier, reaches out and explains the sinister reasons behind her disappearance, Jo leaps into a research rabbit hole teeming with South American Nazi villages, racial impostors, and ancient AI. Despite the life-threatening risks inherent to this research project, Jo glows with newfound purpose.

About the Author:

Dixa Ashariel Ramirez has published extensively in the world of academia, including two books with university presses, and is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. She is currently writing a novel about on a forgotten order of monks in medieval Kazakhstan who make nectar with their bodies in ecstatic divine union, as well as a collection of essays about spiritual awakening and the nature of reality. Mist is her debut novel.

In a review of Mist, Marina Bilbija, who teaches English at Wesleyan University, described Mist with the following words: "What if the worst people you know making the worst art imaginable were not only deciding the future of your career but were somehow hijacking your cosmic destiny too? Josephina, Mist’s reluctant heroine goes to war against the shady forces conspiring against her and other Black women in academia armed with a fabulous wardrobe, hefty liquor cabinet, and a chaotic group chat. Hijinks, horror, and revelations ensue. I couldn’t put it down."

About the Moderator:

Anya Lewis-Meeks is a writer from Kingston, Jamaica, nonfiction editor at Apogee Journal, and current Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Literary Arts at Brown University. A recent Duke PhD in English, she holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University, and a BA from Princeton. She has benefited from the Callaloo Writer's Workshop and the Kimbilio Fiction Writer's Retreat. Her writing has been published in LitHub, Triangle House, Nausikae and elsewhere. She is currently at work on two novels, The Program, about a woman investigating the disappearance of a woman she knew from graduate school while anxiously awaiting her marriage-based green card and Bloodseed, about a Kingston-based eco-activist group battling a climate-imperiled future.

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