VIRTUAL: Debut Authors Panel with Lupita Reads, featuring Benjamin Garcia, Emily Hashimoto & Poupeh Missaghi

Booksmith is very pleased to host a virtual event with a trio of debut authors in conversations about their new books: Benjamin Garcia (Thrown in the Throat), Emily Hashimoto (A World Between) and Poupeh Missaghi (trans(re)lating house one). The panel will be lead by Lupita Reads.

Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order a copy of the authors’ books by clicking on the titles below. We’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay:

Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia

A World Between by Emily Hashimoto

trans(re)lating house one by Poupeh Missaghi

— Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia —

“Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages.” And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.

With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.

Benjamin Garcia’s first collection of poems, Thrown in the Throat, was selected for the 2019 National Poetry Series by Kazim Ali and published by Milkweed Editions. He is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow, was the 2017 Latinx Scholar at the Frost Place, and was a 2018 CantoMundo Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2018, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. Garcia received his MFA from Cornell University and currently works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Order Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia and have it delivered to your door.

— A World Between by Emily Hashimoto —

In 2004, college students Eleanor Suzuki and Leena Shah meet in an elevator. Both girls are on the brink of adulthood, each full of possibility and big ideas, and they fall into a whirlwind romance. Years later, Eleanor and Leena collide on the streets of San Francisco. Although grown and changed and each separately partnered, the two find themselves, once again, irresistibly pulled back together.

Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel perfectly captures the wonder and confusion of growing up and growing closer. Narrated in sparkling prose, A World Between follows two strikingly different but interconnected women as they navigate family, female friendship, and their own fraught history.

Emily Hashimoto is a queer writer of color from the suburbs of New Jersey. She is a graduate of Rutgers University with a degree in women’s and gender studies, and her MS in Information Science from Pratt Institute. She has received fellowships from VONA and Queer Arts. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The Rumpus and Bitch Magazine, centering feminist critique and queer narratives. She lives in New York City with her wife and child.

Order A World Between by Emily Hashimoto and have it delivered to your door.

— trans(re)lating house one by Poupeh Missaghi —

In the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election, a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city’s points of connection—teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars—her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language?

Melding several worlds, perspectives, and narrative styles, trans(re)lating house one translates the various realities of Tehran and its inhabitants into the realm of art, helping us remember them anew.

Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, a translator both into and out of Persian, an editor, and an educator. She holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA in translation studies. Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was published by Coffee House Press in February 2020. Her nonfiction, fiction, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, and she has several books of translation published in Iran. I’ll Be Strong for You, her translation of Iranian author Nasim Marashi’s novel, is forthcoming in spring 2021. As an editor, she worked for many years with Asymptote and is co-editor of Matters of Feminist Practice from Belladonna* Collaborative. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; a faculty mentor at the low-residency MFA of Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland; as well as a writing consultant at Baruch College, CUNY, NY.

Order trans(re)lating house one by Poupeh Missaghi and have it delivered to your door.

– ABOUT THE MODERATOR –

Lupita Aquino—better known as Lupita Reads—is a passionate reader active in both the local and online book community through her Instagram account- @Lupita.Reads. She is the creator of the #LatinxBookstagramTour, a columnist for the Washington Independent Review of Books, a contributor for the Reading Women podcast, and the co-founder and current moderator/curator for LIT on H St. Book Club.

– PLEASE NOTE –

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.