A reading series from incredible local writers who have been a special part of the narrative throughout Davis Square's local independent bookshop's very1st year.

-Registration Required, 21+ Event.

-Doors/Check-In @ 7:20PM, Event Starts 7:30PM.

-Featuring: Aparna Paul , Aube Rey Lescure, Joshua Nguyen, R. F. Kuang, Makana Yamamoto, Neema Avashia.

Further event details & reminders will be sent via email to all registered guests prior to the event.

Aparna Paul (she/her) is a writer, chemical engineer, banana bread enthusiast, & amateur crossword constructor based in Cambridge, MA. Her poetry & prose has been recognized by Reckoning, DMQ Review, & Gaining Ground, among others. She edited the anthology Reflections of The Land (Literary Cleveland, 2022) and is a co-editor of GOOD SOUP, now on hiatus (@goodsoup.mag on insta!). You can find her at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge every Wednesday or hosting the Flow State open mic every third Thursday at Narrative Bookshop. Her first full-length book of poetry, HOME FREE, is forthcoming with Game Over Books in 2025.

Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. Aube’s debut novel, River East, River West,was published in 2024 by William Morrow in the US and Duckworth in the UK. It has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Carol Shields Prize, the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Stanfords Fiction with a Sense of Place Award, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Granta, Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions, WBUR, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022.

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body(Sundress Publications). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and would never allow shoes on the bed. He has received fellowships from Kenyon Review, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag and is a professional dilly-dallyier. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi and currently teaches Poetry Workshop at Tufts University.

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis (forthcoming). Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. She was named to the 2023 Time100 Next list and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she researches Sinophone literature and Asian American literature.

Makana Yamamoto was born on the island of Maui. Splitting their time between the Mainland and Hawaiʻi, Makana grew up on beaches and in snowbanks. Always a scientist at heart, Makana fell in love with sci-fi as a teen–they even led the science fiction and fantasy interest house at their college. A writer from childhood, fiction became the perfect medium for them to explore their interests as well as reconnect with their culture, coalescing into a passion for diverse sci-fi. They love writing multicultural settings and queer characters, as well as imagining what the future might look like for historically marginalized communities. In their free time, Makana likes to hoard dice for their Dungeons & Dragons games, defeat bosses with their guildmates, and get way too invested in reality competition shows. They currently live in Boston with their wife and two cats.

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.

Near & Dear Writers: The Reading Series