The Black Mountain Institute, The Believer magazine, and The Writer’s Block announce a new event series featuring critically-acclaimed authors in conversation. Our inaugural event features R.O. Kwon in conversation with novelist Derek Palacio about Kwon’s highly-anticipated debut, The Incendiaries, which according to Celeste Ng explores “the lines between faith and fanaticism, passion and violence, the rational and the unknowable." Signing and reception to follow.

R.O. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, is published by Riverhead (U.S.) and forthcoming from Virago (U.K.) in September 2018. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Electric Literature, Playboy, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Omi International, and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. Born in South Korea, she’s mostly lived in the United States.

Derek Palacio is the author of the novella How to Shake the Other Man and the novel The Mortifications. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

This event is free and open to the public but a reservation is required.

Visit our website for a list of BMI's upcoming events.