Babylon Salon: Anna North, Vince Granata, Mia P. Manansala, Tonya M. Foster & Zoe Fitzgerald

Babylon Salon presents a special
online performance
Saturday, September 11, 2021
5pm PST / 8pm EST

Anna North

(Outlawed; The Life and Death of Sophie Stark)

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK * INDIE NEXT SELECTION * LIBRARY READS SELECTION * AMAZON BEST OF THE MONTH AND EDITOR’S PICK

“North’s knockout latest chronicles the travails of a midwife’s daughter who joins a group of female and nonbinary outlaws near the end of the 19th century . . . The characters’ struggles for gender nonconformity and LGBTQ rights are tenderly and beautifully conveyed. This feminist western parable is impossible to put down.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“2021 is already a year that could use a little joy. Here to provide some is the scrappy new feminist Western novel Outlawed . . . It’s an absolute romp and contains basically everything I want in a book: witchy nuns, heists, a marriage of convenience, and a midwife trying to build a bomb out of horse dung.” – Vox

Anna North is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of two previous novels,America Pacifica and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, which received a Lambda Literary Award in 2016 . She has been a writer and editor at Jezebel,BuzzFeed, Salon, and the New York Times, and she is now a senior reporter at Vox. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn.

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Vince Granata

(Everything is Fine)

“Although he writes of an unimaginable family tragedy, Vincent Granata’s Everything is Fine reads like a testament to life itself. Suffused with emotional depth and intellectual inquiry, this is a writer pushing the very limits of what language and love can capture: the suffering, certainly, but more so the astonishing power of forgiveness and survival. This book will never leave you.” —Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

Vince Granata received his BA in history from Yale University and his MFA in creative writing from American University. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation, and residencies from PLAYA and the MacDowell Colony. His work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and Fourth Genre, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2018.

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Tonya M. Foster

(A Swarm of Bees in High Court)

Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is an editor at Fence Magazine, and at The African-American Review. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Tripwire, boundary2, MiPOESIAS, NYFA Arts Quarterly, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. Tonya is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Ford and the Mellon Foundations, from NYFA; and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and at the Macdowell colony. Her next collections are a cross-genre collection on New Orleans—A Mathematics of Chaos::Thingification (forthcoming from Ugly Presse 2021), and Monkey Talk, a cross-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthestics, and surveillance. She is an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts.

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Mia P. Manansala

(Arsenic and Adobo)

Mia P. Manansala (she/her) is a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the winner of the 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck – Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. She’s also a 2017 Pitch Wars alum and 2018-2020 mentor. Her debut novel, ARSENIC AND ADOBO, came out May 4, 2021 with Berkley/Penguin Random House and is the first in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series.

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with music by

Zoe Fitzgerald Carter

(Imperfect Endings; Waterlines)

“The questions that rise from her story are urgent, important and timely…sharply focused, engaged with essential ethical questions…the end of the book is so full of grace and acceptance that one might forget the memoir began with such urgent, roaring questions.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Zoe FitzGerald Carter is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Vogue. Imperfect Endings won first place in the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association’s literary contest, was excerpted in O magazine and chosen as a finalist for the National MS Society’s Books for a Better Life Awards in the “Inspirational Memoir” category. It was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.

Zoe is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, where she teaches memoir. She has also taught (and run) writing workshops from Hawaii to Vermont, and currently teaches memoir and songwriting at Left Margin Lit in Berkeley, CA. In the last couple of years, she’s been focusing on her career as a musician. Her first CD, Waiting for the Earthquake came out in 2017 and can be found on all the streaming platforms. Her new album, Waterlines, was released in 2021.

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in partnership with our friends at 

The Booksmith,

currently offering curbside pickup and in-person browsing

in their new location  at 

1727 Haight Street, San Francisco

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Free Admission!