Red Light Lit Austin presents: Lions Like Us Book Launch Party

Join us at Vintage Bookstore & Wine Bar for an incredible evening of poetry, storytelling, and live music, to celebrate the release of Hollie Hardy's new poetry collection, Lions Like Us from Red Light Lit Press, with readings by KB Brookins, Hollie Hardy, Loria Mendoza, Dale Bridges, Heidi Kasa, C. Prudence Arceneaux and S.C. Says.

In Lions Like Us, as the poet herself writes, “every poem is a love poem” — to others, and to the world itself. Reading this book is like falling in love, then parting, then returning to the beloved, again and again and again. Reader, enter to weep, to laugh, to find solidarity. Enter to find, in its purest, most intense, most direct and available form, poetry.

~Matthew Zapruder, author of Story of a Poem and Father's Day

Hollie Hardy is a writer, educator, and author of the newly released Lions Like Us (Red Light Lit Press) and How to Take a Bullet: And Other Survival Poems (Punk Hostage Press) winner of the Annual Poetry Center Book Award at San Francisco State University. She holds an MFA in Poetry from SFSU, teaches private writing workshops online, founded Praxis Poetry: Weekly Prompts for Poets, and hosts the long-running monthly reading series Saturday Night Special: A Virtual Open Mic. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. She lives in Austin, TX.
Learn more at: holliehardy.com. Follow her on Instagram @hollie.hardy

KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty released in May 2024 with Alfred A. Knopf.
Learn more at earthtokb.com. Follow them online at @earthtokb.

Loria Mendoza (she/they) is a queer Chicanx writer, curator, musician, and performance artist from Austin, Texas. They have an MFA in the Creative Writing from SFSU, and their work has been published in numerous literary journals. Their book, Life’s Too Short (Fourteen Hills Press, 2017) won the Michael Rubin Book Award, and they are currently finishing a novel, a book of poetry, and a horror novelette. They have performed across the country at Red Light Lit, The Austin Poetry Brothel, Bay Area Generations, Voz Sin Tinta, MFA Mixer 2.0, Velro, Oakland’s Beast Crawl, and San Francisco’s Litquake. Loria is the curator and host of Red Light Lit Austin.
Learn more at loriamendoza.com. Follow her on Instagram at @textualseduction

Andre Bradford, a.k.a. S.C. Says, is an Austin based slam poet who has been performing since 2013. He's toured and featured at venues and universities across the country, and his work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Write About Now, The Edge radio, The Culture Trip, and Blavity. He is a two time Austin Poetry Slam Champion, the 2022 Texas Grand Slam Champion, and is the author of the poetry collection Golden Brown Skin. He also once popped a bag of popcorn without burning a single kernel, which is arguably one of his greatest achievements.
Learn more at scsayspoetry.com. Follow him on Instagram @scsays

Heidi Kasa is the author of Split (Monday Night Press, 2022), and her writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, Ruminate, and The Racket, among others. She won the 2024 Plaza Prose Poetry Prize and the 2023 Poetry Super Highway Poetry Prize. Kasa’s flash fiction collection The Beginners won the 2023 Digging Press Chapbook Contest, and is forthcoming in 2025. She works as an editor and creates handmade artist books. 
See more at www.heidikasa.com. Follow her on Instagram @split_chapbook

C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Academy of American Poets’ Poem- A- Day, Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry-- DIRT (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and LIBERTY. Her debut full length collection PROPRIOCEPTION is out 2025 from Texas Review Press.

Dale Bridges is a fiction writer, essayist, and painter. His work has appeared in more than thirty publications, including The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Barrelhouse Magazine. For several years, he was the arts-and-entertainment editor at the Boulder Weekly, where he won journalism awards for his feature writing and cultural criticism. He has published a book of short stories Justice, Inc. (Monkey Puzzle Press) and a novel called The Mean Reds (SFA Press). He currently lives in Austin and works at the library.
Learn more at DaleBridges.org. Follow him on Instagram @bridges.writer

Host or Publisher Hollie Hardy