Ghosts Across America w/ Chris Vanjonack, Weston Morrow, & Lena Valencia
About this Event
Join us for an evening of contemporary speculative fiction with debut authors Chris Vanjonack and Weston Morrow, plus special guest Lena Valencia!
The three authors will discuss their work and provide readings of their spooky and thoughtful poetry and prose.
About the participants:
Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Denver, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Book of the Month Club's Volume 0, Recommended Reading, Barrelhouse, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Out of Body is his first book.
Weston Morrow is the author of Cloud Builder, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series, forthcoming from University of Georgia Press on Sept. 1, 2026. His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in English Literature from Central Washington University. A former print journalist, he teaches writing at The Ohio State University.
Lena Valencia is the author of the short story collection Mystery Lights (Tin House Books), which was longlisted for the Story Prize, named a Best Short Story Collection of 2024 by Electric Literature, and a Best Horror Book of 2024 by Esquire. Her fiction has appeared in BOMB, The Baffler, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Epiphany, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Convent Arts Fellowship. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School and is the director of educational programming at One Story. She lives in Los Angeles.
About Out of Body:
A wildly inventive collection of interconnected speculative stories—spanning the multiverse, demonic attachment, and life after death—from an electrifying new voice in fiction.
An aimless ghost haunts his ex-girlfriend for evidence that she’s actually upset about his death.
A group of teens discovers a machine that purports to predict the best day of its users’ lives.
A young woman is horrified to discover that an aggressive stranger she met on a night of bar-hopping now manifests in every photo that is taken of her.
A drunken posse descends into the woods in search of clowns that have been terrorizing their small town.
Chris Vanjonack’s fiction is haunted not only by specters of death, but by the elusive questions of life, and above all, the wonder and horror of the infinite. Uncanny, surreal, and infectiously clever, the stories in this linked collection contain horrors great and small, fueled as much by the fantastic as by longing, dread, and all-too-human frailties.
Morbidly funny and brilliantly observed, Out of Body is an atmospheric, dead original feast for the senses.
About Cloud Builder:
What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington state, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past.
These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt “the past, who can’t stop turning back / for one last look”?
About Mystery Lights:
Introducing an electrifying new voice in contemporary fiction that illuminates the many forces that haunt us.
An influencer attempts to derail a viral TV marketing campaign with her violent cult following. A marriage between two ghost hunters is threatened when one of them loses her ability to see spirits. The lives of a famous painter in the twilight of her career and a teenage ufo enthusiast converge when a mysterious glowing orb appears in their small desert town. And a slasher-flick screenwriter looking for inspiration escapes a pack of wild dogs only to find herself locked in an suv with a strange man beside her.
From the all-too-real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister transformed by cave-dwelling creatures, Lena Valencia’s debut story collection, Mystery Lights, grapples with terrors both familiar and fantastic.
Where is it happening?
USD 0.00
