Book Signing & Reading with Hermitage Fellow Joseph Earl Thomas
Schedule
Thu Dec 18 2025 at 06:00 pm to 07:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Bookstore1Sarasota | Sarasota, FL
Award-winning Hermitage Fellow Joseph Earl Thomas reads work that fuses memoir, fiction, and poetry in "The Fantasy of Reality."About this Event
Presented in partnership with The Hermitage Artist Retreat, join us for a conversation and book signing with Hermitage Fellow Joseph Earl Thomas. Registration is required ($5 per person). The event is in person in the Loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple.
Register here: https://pci.jotform.com/form/253095687663168
Order a copy of God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer here: https://shop.sarasotabooks.com/product/god-bless-you-otis-spunkmeyer
Hermitage Fellow Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer who straddles form, from memoir and nonfiction to fiction and poetry. He is celebrated for his distinctive style that often pushes expectations, and his work often plays with the boundaries between fantasy and reality. His memoir Sink was hailed as “extraordinary” by The New York Times. Past Hermitage Fellow and National Book Award winner Justin Torres said Thomas’ novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer“reads like direct communication from the soul.” Join us as this acclaimed author discusses and shares excerpts from new and published works. Joseph Earl Thomas’ Hermitage Residency is generously sponsored by Georgia Court. Presented in partnership with Bookstore1.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and shortlisted for the Patrick Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. His prose and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Verge, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vanity Fair, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Dilettante Army. His honors include the Chautauqua Janus Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. A graduate of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College as well as low-residency MFA programs at Holy Family and Randolph Colleges, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory, and more at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
ABOUT THE BOOK
An “intoxicating, propulsive…utterly mesmerizing” novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student (Kaveh Akbar, author ofMartyr!)
After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student and EMS worker, he encounters round-the-clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg Pr*son for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility.
Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a powerful examination of everyday Black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
ABOUT THE HERMITAGE ARTIST RETREAT
A leading national arts incubator, the Hermitage is the only major arts organization in Florida's Gulf Coast exclusively committed to supporting the development and creation of new work across all artistic disciplines. The Hermitage hosts artists on its Gulf Coast Manasota Key campus for multi-week residencies, where diverse and accomplished artists from around the world and across multiple disciplines create and develop new works of theater, music, visual art, literature, dance, film, and more. As part of their residencies, Hermitage Fellows participate in free year-round community programs, offering audiences in the region a unique opportunity to engage with some of the world's leading artists and to get an authentic "sneak peek" into extraordinary projects and artistic minds before their works go on to major galleries, concert halls, theaters, and museums around the world. These free and innovative programs include performances, conversations, readings, music concerts, interactive experiences, open studios, school programs, teacher workshops, and more, serving thousands in our regional community each year.
Where is it happening?
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
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