Melissa Faliveno launches "Hemlock," in conversation with T Kira Madden

Melissa will be joined by author T Kira Madden for a reading, conversation, Q&A, reception and signing. Light refreshments will be served.

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Sam, finally sober and stable with a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Sam’s mind. It starts, as it always does, with a beer.

As Sam dips back into the murky waters of dependency, the inexplicable begins to arrive at her door and her body takes on a strange new shape. As the borders of reality begin to blur, she senses she is battling something sinister—whether nested in the woods or within herself.

Hemlock is a carnal coming-of-addiction, a dark sparkler about rapture, desire, transformation, and transcendence in many forms. What lives at the heart of fear—animal, monster, or man? How can we reject our own inheritance, the psychic storm that’s been coming for generations, and rebuild a new home for ourselves? In the tradition of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Hemlock is a butch Black Swan and a novel of singular style, with all the edginess of a survival story and a simmering menace that glints from the very periphery of the page.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her writing has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, Bitch magazine, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman and the forthcoming Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin and a longtime resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill.

T Kira Madden is a diasporic Kanaka 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) writer and author of the novel Whidbey, forthcoming with Mariner in winter 2026. Her memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award. She is the Founding Editor of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Tin House, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Winner of the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award, she served as the Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and currently teaches at Hamilton College as an assistant professor in Creative Writing and Indigenous literatures.

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