Join us Monday September 25th as we read, cook, and eat with Isle McElroy (People Collide), Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Promise), and returning TOC reader Jamel Brinkley (Witness). The novels and stories from these authors have filled up our late-summer minds, and we can't wait to bring some of their work to the table at Insa. In case you're not already familiar with this crew, here's a bit to whet your appetites:
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Writer’s Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), The New York Review of Books, BOMB! Magazine, and many others.
Isle McElroy is a non-binary writer based in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, The Atmospherians, was named a New York Times Editors' Choice. Their second novel, People Collide, will be published in September. Other writing appears in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Cut, Vulture, GQ, Vogue, The Atlantic, Tin House, and elsewhere. Isle was named one of The Strand's 30 Writers to Watch. They have received fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Tin House Summer Workshop, The Sewanee Writers Conference, The Inprint Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and The National Parks Service.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023), out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)/4th Estate (UK), and A Lucky Man: Stories (2018, Graywolf Press), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Each ticket includes all food as well as your choice of a literary cocktail inspired by Rachel, Isle, and Jamel's books, dreamed up by Cocktails In Color co-authors Olivia McGiff and Sammi Katz. Additional drinks will be available for purchase and, trust us, you're going to want to try more than one!
We'll conclude with a conversation between the authors and TOC founder Evan Hanczor. Our friends at Center for Fiction will be with us selling books, so come ready to pick up some copies! And as mentioned this is an official Brooklyn Book Festival Bookends event, part of a full spread of literary programming in the weeks around the festival, so be sure to check out the other book events happening in the borough this month.
We do have a handful of seats reserved for sliding-scale admission to keep these events as accessible as possible, so please let us know if this ticket price is prohibitive for you. We want to get you a seat at the table. These sliding scale seats are limited, so please be thoughtful about your resources and needs when making a request.
Email us at biscuits@tablesofcontents.org or DM us at @tables.of.contents on IG with any questions. We can't wait to see you at this table.