Rachel Swearingen presents How to Walk on Water
Event Information
About this Event
Join authors Rachel Swearingen and Angela Ajayi for a conversation about short fiction and reading like a writer, on Thursday January 7.
In Swearingen’s spellbinding debut story collection, characters willingly open their doors to trouble. An investment banker falls for a self-made artist who turns the rooms of her apartment into eerie art installations. An au pair imagines her mundane life as film noir, endangering the infant in her care. A son pieces together the brutal attack his mother survived when he was a baby. These stories bristle with menace and charm with intimate revelations. Through nimble prose and considerable powers of observation, Swearingen takes us from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Northern Michigan, to Seattle, Venice, and elsewhere. She explores not only what it means to survive in a world marked by violence and uncertainty, but also how to celebrate what is most alive.
Event access is $5, which gives you access to the virtual event (access instructions provided via email 24-48 hours prior to event), as well as a $5 virtual gift card to magersandquinn.com. Use it toward your copy of [BOOK TITLE], or anything else from our web store!
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About the speakers:
Rachel Swearingen’s stories and essays have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and others. Her debut story collection, How to Walk on Water won the 2018 New American Fiction Prize. She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of “30 Writers to Watch” by the Guild Literary Complex. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD from Western Michigan University. She currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Visit her website at www.rachelswearingen.com.
Angela Ajayi’s first story, “Galina,” published in Fifth Wednesday Journal, won the 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her essays, book reviews, and author interviews have appeared in The Common Online, Wild River Review, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune where she is a contributing book critic. She holds a BA in English literature from Calvin College and an MA in comparative literature from Columbia University.. In her fiction, she often seeks to explore the intersection of race, gender, and class in cross-cultural spaces. She is working on her first collection of stories.