Lost and Found: MUTHA x Pen Parentis x Lofty Pigeon Get Lit(erary)

Family can be made and unmade, lost and found. MUTHA and Pen Parentis present a night out with parents who are writers/artists across genres who speak to the complexity (and sometimes hilarity) of making or breaking connections—and ways that we can all come together in a community of creative folks. Featuring cartoonist and comedian Emily Flake (All Toddlers are Scorpios and Mama Tried); journalist and memoirist Emi Nietfeld (Acceptance); and graphic artist Cat Willett (Unconditional).

Join for short readings, a panel, and gratis wine/snacks/chatting/book signing from 7 to 8:30pm at Lofty Pigeon Books in Brooklyn, with after-party at Hinterlands next door (cash bar). Moderated by Meg Lemke of MUTHA and M. M. De Voe of Pen Parentis.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2025 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT.

About the moderators

Meg Lemke is the comics and graphic novels reviews at Publishers Weekly and Editor-in-Chief of MUTHA Magazine. She’s acted as series editor for the Illustrated PEN series (PEN America) and curated programs at PEN World Voices Festival, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and for the French Comics Association. Her writing has appeared in MUTHA, Publishers Weekly, The Paris Review, Seattle Review, The Atlanta Review, and Seleni, among other places. Find her @meglemke. She lives in Brooklyn.

M. M. De Voe is an internationally published fictionista. Columbia University Writing Fellow, MFA. Five Pushcart nominations, two Editor’s Prizes, a Shirley Jackson Award, a Hugo nomination, and two children later, De Voe founded Pen Parentis.

Collected wisdoms from first 10 years of running Pen Parentis in Book & Baby (first prize at the 2021 NextGen Indie Awards in the category of writing guides). Debut fiction: A Flash of Darkness: Collected Stories of M. M. De Voe (Borda Books, 2023), was called “masterfully conceived” by Kirkus Reviews. An inaugural member of the Lithuanian Writers of the Diaspora Forum, M lives in New York City.

About the featured speakers

Emily Flake is a cartoonist, writer, comic, and educator. She is the recipient of the 2026 Thurber Award for Cartoon Art and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, where she will be in residence in Spring 2027, and was a Yaddo fellow in 2025. She is the author of several books, most recently Joke in a Box: How to Write and Draw Jokes, and illustrator of All Toddlers are Scorpios. She is also the founder and operator of the St. Nell’s Humor Writing Residency in Williamsport, PA. She makes her home in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and disquietingly large cat.

Emi Nietfeld is a journalist covering fertility technology and inequality — a beat shaped by her years as a software engineer at Google and Meta. A recipient of the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Reporting Fellowship and a winner of the New York Press Club award for feature writing, her stories appear in Wired, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New York Times, and other publications. She is also the author of Acceptance (Penguin Press, 2022), a memoir examining foster care, homelessness, and the myth of meritocracy named one of NPR’s best books of the year, and a contributor to No Contact, an anthology that illuminates the realities and nuances of family estrangement.

Cat Willett is an illustrator and author based in Brooklyn, NY. Her new book, Unconditional, Stories of Women and the Animals They Love, is an intimate and moving collection of stories about women and their life-changing relationships with animals, told in vivid graphic novel style. She holds an MFA in Illustration from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Cat loves to teach art workshops, especially to non-artists, and she is currently an adjunct professor at LaGuardia Community College, where she teaches the history of illustration, from medieval art to modern illustration in all its forms.