Louise Marburg and Elizabeth Hazen at the Baltimore Book Festival

Kick off your day at the Festival at 11AM with Louise Marburg in conversation with Elizabeth Hazen, who will be celebrating Louise Marburg's new novel, Fancy Meeting You!

Fancy Meeting You follows Laura in her home in Baltimore and elsewhere through her fiftieth year. Each chapter marks her encounter with a new character--a family member or two, a potential lover, complete strangers-each offering their own brand of wisdom or judgment or wacky opinion. Somehow, through these entanglements, Laura begins to gather bits and pieces of the self-knowledge she is lacking.

Louise Marburg is the author of three collections of stories, the most recent being You Have Reached Your Destination, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has been published in such journals as Story, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and many others. Marburg studied design at the Kansas City Art Institute, is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin Division, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has been a scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a fellow at the Kenyon Writing Workshops, and her work has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A native of Baltimore, she lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg. Fancy Meeting You is her first novel.

Elizabeth Hazen is a poet, essayist, and teacher. She is currently teaching poetry at Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup through the Goucher College Pr*son Education Partnership. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Epoch, American Literary Review, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah Literary Magazine, and other journals. She has published three collections of poetry: Chaos Theories (Alan Squire Publishing, 2016), Girls Like Us (Alan Squire Publishing, 2020), and The Sky Will Hold (Riot in Your Throat, 2026). She lives in Baltimore with her family.