Diana Xin with Juan Carlos Reyes — 'Book of Exemplary Women'

Third Place Books welcomes author Diana Xin to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her debut short story collection Book of Exemplary Women, which pushes back on the habitual erasure of women's voices as it traces an intergenerational haunting. Diana will be joined in conversation by author Juan Carlos Reyes (Three Alarm Fire).

Diana Xin writes with quiet intensity, emotional acuity, and impressive range, as though we are peering into a dozen kitchen windows and catching our neighbors at their most intimate, soul-baring, and true."
—Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured books!

This event is free to attend. Registration is recommended in advance.

Please note: While RSVP helps us anticipate attendance, your RSVP may not guarantee a seat. Seating is first-come, first-served, and all events at our Ravenna neighborhood store are free and open to the public. Only standing room may be available for events with high interest.

We are happy to accommodate any accessibility concerns. Please contact us at [email protected] or call our Ravenna store at (206) 525-2347.

In Book of Exemplary Women, Diana Xin’s debut short story collection, a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they navigate unspoken regrets and unfulfilled desires. Teen girls grapple with grief as they face the end of childhood and other losses. Young lovers confront the future while old lovers excavate the past. Mothers and daughters perceive each other in new ways as time reshapes their relationship. Across different stages of life, women strain against the expectations that rule their lives with quiet rebellion, bending and breaking to find new forms large enough to contain all that they carry. Together, their voices resist erasure, tracing how women hold themselves and each other intact. To create the cracks that expand possibility and challenge limitations, Xin presents both realist stories and their shadows--distortions upon the same themes with elements of magic, from light-touch hauntings to imagined literary trysts. Her characters defy the erasure common to stories about women. When they step off the page, they do so with defiance, laughing and raging as they slip beyond reach.

Born in the Hebei province of China and raised in the American Midwest, Diana Xin's work appears in Electric Literature, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She studied creative writing at the University of Montana and is a recipient of fellowships and awards from Hedgebrook, Mineral Arts & Residencies, Artist Trust of Washington State, the M Literary Residency in Beijing, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Book of Exemplary Women is her debut collection of short stories. She serves as a contributing editor for Moss, a journal of the Pacific Northwest.

Juan Carlos Reyes's debut fiction collection Three Alarm Fire (Hinton Publishing, 2025) was selected for KUOW NPR's January 2025 Book Club and for PEN America's The PEN Ten. His stories, poems and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Waccamaw Journal, and Hawai’i Review, among others. He has been the recipient of the Gar LaSalle Artist Trust Storyteller Award, a PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship, and a Jack Straw Writers Fellowship, among others. He received his MFA from The University of Alabama and has taught with Stetson University's MFA of the Americas. He is a former board president of Seattle City of Literature and formerly served as Executive Editor of Big Fiction Magazine. He now serves as an Associate Professor of creative writing at Seattle University.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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