Reading & Convo: Jennifer Maritza McCauley "Neon Steel" (w/ Chiwan Choi)

We are so pleased to welcome multi-genre writer Jennifer Maritza McCauley back to White Whale for the release of her newest collection, Neon Steel. Fittingly, these vibrant, inventive, speculative stories are set in Pittsburgh! Jennifer will read with poet Chiwan Choi, another champion of experimental lit and friend to White Whale.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Neon Steel is acclaimed writer Jennifer Maritza McCauley's love letter to millennial nerd culture. Anime fans, vampires, indie rappers, robots, comic book fans, and thrill seekers find their way through the Steel City's neighborhoods and haunts. A young girl discovers an underground world of Afro Otaku who change the way she sees the city; a high school student discovers a kindred spirit in a Bomba girl; The Terminator (1984) is reimagined as a josei story featuring a purple loc'd robot; and a secret coven of vampires who hide out in Pittsburgh steel mills risk being discovered after they lose one of their own. Magical realist and neon-lit, Neon Steel faithfully follows a group of nerds and the magic that excites them, bringing to life a city and a state of being.

JENNIFER MARITZA McCAULEY is the author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (Stalking Horse Press), the short story collections When Trying to Return Home (Counterpoint Press) & Recognition (U.Wisconsin Press, '27), Neon Steel ('26, Cornerstone), a speculative collection, and the poetry collections Kinds of Grace (Flowersong Press), VERSUS and TUMBAO ('29), both on Texas Review Press. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (prose), CantoMundo (poetry), Kimbilio (fiction) and Sundress Academy for the Arts (hybrid) and her work has been a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Must-Read by Bookshop, Elle, Popsugar, HipLatina and others.  She is seasonal faculty at Yale Writers’ Workshop and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she teaches poetry and fiction in their MFA program.

CHIWAN CHOI is the author of five books of poetry: The Flood, the Daughter trilogy—Abductions, The Yellow House and my name is wolf—and Sky Songs. He wrote, presented and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. His writing has appeared in New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Zócalo Public Square and other publications. Chiwan is a partner at the experimental literary laboratory Writ Large Projects.

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