The annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference is one of our favorite events of the year! Our team is headed to Portland March 27-30 for the conference Bookfair (T10029), and we’re excited to share some of our authors’ onsite panels and offsite events.

Author Signing Times • Table T10029

• Thursday, 3/28 at 4:30-5 Charlie J. Eskew signing Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark

• Friday, 3/29 at 1:30-2:30 Andrew Katz signing The Vampire Gideon’s Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls

• Saturday, 3/30 at 12-1 Anca Szilágyi signing Daughters of the Air

• Saturday, 3/30 at 1:30-2:30 Carmen Maria Machado signing Carmilla

Our Authors in Portland

Charlie J. Eskew

Charlie J. Eskew is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. He is a professional comic book shop lurker and tenured Black dude in America. Please satisfy your unnatural obsession with him via Twitter @CJEskew or his website, www.askeweskew.com.

• Thursday, 4:30-5: Signing at Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

• Friday, 3-4:15: Monsters, Marvels, & Melanin: A Discussion of Black Speculative Fiction panel in room F149

• Saturday, 1:30-3:30: The Sixth Annual Rock and Roll Reading at Mississippi Studios (RSVP on Facebook)

Anca L. Szilágyi

Anca L. Szilágyi grew up in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Gastronomica, and Fairy Tale Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the inaugural Artist Trust/Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, a Made at Hugo House fellowship, and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. The Stranger hailed Anca as one of the "fresh new faces in Seattle fiction." She lives in Seattle with her husband.

• Thursday, 6:30-9: The Second Annual Strange Theater, A Fabulist Reading at Lucky Labrador Brewing Company (RSVP on Facebook)

• Saturday, 12-1: Signing at Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

• Saturday, 1:30-2:30: Signing at the Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

Andrew Katz

Andrew Katz, when not reading and writing fiction, enjoys puppers and doggos, black coffee, hiking, and writing bios that read like poorly made dating profiles. He is also the proud owner of several paintings that he painted himself and now hides from the world because they’re bad. He lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

• Friday, 1:30-2:30: Signing at the Lanternfish Press booth (T10029)

It's that time of year again, when writers and publishers from across the country descend upon a conference center for the madness that is AWP: the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Annual Conference.

We'll be heading to Tampa, Florida, for this year's conference, so please come say hello! You can find us at table T-1246 for the duration of the conference (March 7-10).

Two Lanternfish authors will be signing books: Allison Coffelt (Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip Through Haiti, forthcoming March 20) on Thursday, March 8, from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. and Anca L. Szilágyi (Daughters of the Air, December 2017) on Friday, March 9, from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.

Anca will also be reading from her novel at an offsite event, Strange Theater: A Menagerie of Fabulists on Thursday, March 8, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. That's being held at 5 Star Dive Bar, 1811 North 15th Street, Tampa, FL 33605. She will join other fabulist authors including Anne Valente, Daniel Hoyt, Adrienne Celt, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Tessa Mellas, Jason Teal, Dana Diehl, and Melissa Goodrich.

You can find Allison on the panel "The Dividing Line": Blending Research in Personal Narratives, along with Jon Pineda, Joni Tevis, and Colin Rafferty. This panel will run in Room 13 on the first floor of the convention center on Friday, March 9, from 1:30 to 2:45 p.m.

We hope to see you soon. Come, visit; tell us what you've been working on since we saw you last!

If you won't be at AWP, you can follow along on our adventures via Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. (And don't forget to follow along with the conference at large with #AWP18.)

Collingswood Book Festival

Our first time at a local book festival with a surprising number of author connections

Just a hop-skip away from our home base in Philadelphia is the Collingswood Book Festival, an annual one-day event held in Collingswood, New Jersey. 

It was our first time at this event, so we took the opportunity to make a few new friends (and hang out with one of our authors.)

Philly's Lanternfish Press represents at Collingswood Book Fair pic.twitter.com/x1FhJr703g

— Kevin Riordan (@Inqkriordan) October 7, 2017

Other Worlds artist Saul Rosenbaum stopped by to sign a few things and hang out with us in the slightly hot but otherwise lovely day. 

#collsbook #Otherworlds #coloringbook

4 Likes, 1 Comments - Catherine Gladney Gross (@cat92155) on Instagram: "#collsbook #Otherworlds #coloringbook"

You can pick up a copy of Other Worlds on our website! And, if you're in the Philadelphia area, keep an eye out: there may be a few coloring parties on the way.

But that's not our only connection to Collingswood: Salamanders of the Silk Road author Christopher Smith lived in West Collingswood Heights (on Lincoln Avenue) from 1980 through 1987 and graduated from Haddon Township High School in 1987. He attended Audubon United Methodist Church and worked as a busboy at Rexy's Bar and then at Chubby's 1 1/2 Hearth.

We had a wonderful time at the book festival this year, and we look forward to another visit next fall!

This year's Brooklyn Book Fest is behind us, and we had a fantastic time meeting new readers and old fans alike this year! 

We had quite a few samplers for new readers to check out: a selected entry from Vikram Paralkar's The Afflictions and first-chapter samples of Christopher Smith's Salamanders of the Silk Road and our December release, Daughters of the Air by Anca L. Szilágyi.

Daughters of the Air Tour of Gowanus

We were joined this weekend by Anca L. Szilágyi in advance of Daughters of the Air's debut. During the afternoon of the festival, we had the opportunity to explore Brooklyn for an Instagram tour.

Daughters of the Air (December 5, 2017) is a literary fabulist story of a runaway teen set across the Americas:

Tatiana “Pluta” Spektor was a mostly happy, if awkward, young girl—until her sociologist father was disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War. Sent a world away by her grieving mother to attend boarding school outside New York City, Pluta wrestles alone with the unresolved tragedy and at last runs away: to the streets of Brooklyn in 1980, where she figuratively—and literally—spreads her wings.

The author took us on a walking tour of Gowanus, Brooklyn, where many scenes in the novel are set.

Our walking tour centered mainly around the Gowanus Canal, including a bridge where Pluta learns about the area's history. During the tour, Szilágyi mentioned the fascinating appeal of the "nooks and crannies" around the canal, which is surrounded by dead-end streets with seemingly no purpose.

You can find more scenes from the tour by following Anca Szilágyi on Instagram.

Brooklyn Book Festival is one of our favorite events of the year, and 2017 was a wonderful time. We look forward to seeing everyone at BKBF 2018!

We’re fast gearing up for the official release of this fall’s novella: THE AFFLICTIONS, a fictional encyclopedia of archaic medicine written by a contemporary physician and scientist, Dr. Vikram Paralkar.

If you’re a fan of magical realism in general, or of beautifully written pseudo-reference works like the Book of Imaginary Beings or Invisible Cities, you don’t want to miss this! You can pre-order through Barnes & Noble or our website; the book will be shipped at the end of the month and there will be a launch party on November 5 at the Mütter Muesum of the College of Physicians:

AFFLICTIONS BOOK LAUNCH
Wednesday, November 5
7:00pm
Mütter Museum
19 South 22nd St
Philadelphia, PA

The event is free and open to the public, but please visit the Facebook event page and let us know if you plan to attend!

Can’t wait to see you there!