>>RSVP This event is all-ages :)
Mark Wadley will be reading from his new book All By Our Lonesome, a collection of linked stories set in a version of central Alabama where it hasn’t rained in months and the moon keeps getting closer.
Mark Wadley is an Alabamian living in Baltimore, where he plays music, makes theater, edits Deterritorial Audio Magazine, and loves his wife. He is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore.
Joining him is MK Foster, a poet and Renaissance literature scholar from Birmingham, Alabama. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Columbia Review; Crazyhorse; Boston Review; Rattle; The Offing; Sixth Finch; and elsewhere; and her work has been recognized with a Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, two Pushcart Prize nominations, a Best of the Net nomination, and most recently, inclusion in Best New Poets 2017. She currently teaches and pursues a Ph.D. at the University of Alabama, where her interests include ecocriticism, horror, and the body.
Praise for All By Our Lonesome:
"The author of the Book of Matthew begins with an exhaustive genealogy of his new prophet-protagonist. It somehow seems fitting that any praise for this book of Mark—that is, Mark Wadley's haunting and transcendent novella-in-stories, All By Our Lonesome—would begin with a similar list of forebears. Yes, there's the echo of Brad Watson here, and Barry Hannah, probably some Denis Covington, for good measure. There's also a reverent nod to James Agee and Carl Carmer. Writers of and for the melancholy American South. But there's whimsy here too—and magic, and music-of-the-spheres, and metafiction—and therefore, also, something of the Universal. For every echo of Job and the cynic-sage of Ecclesiastes, there's the moondance of Calvino's Cosmicomics; there's Dante's urge toward a sublime and out-of-this-world kingdom come; there's the vital, ancient wisdom of Eve, of Esther, and of Wisdom's Proverbs. Even more exciting for those of us who seek smart new voices for understanding the world we now inhabit in this uneasy meantime, there is the irrefutable truth that Mark Wadley can spin a story that feels just like an old-time prophecy."
- TJ Beitelman, author of John The Revelator