The Mill City Reading Series is a monthly showcase of works in progress by MFA in Creative Writing students at the University of Minnesota.

Come celebrate the first books of two clever and funny new writers.

About Ben Purkert's For the Love of Endings:

How does it feel to lose your planet, your lover, yourself? Ben Purkert’s debut collection, For the Love of Endings, tests what connects us to this earth and to each other. His brilliantly crafted poems examine “the gap / between the world & how / people paint it: dark, distant, there / for the taking.” He makes us look at our disintegrating world head on and see what we’ve done to it, and what it has done to us.

Ben Purkert teaches creative writing at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.


About Sally Franson's A Lady's Guide to Selling Out:

Casey Pendergast used to be a typical book-loving English major. Now she works as a superstar brand strategist at a top ad agency and spends her days poring over social media rather than the latest Pulitzer Prize winner. When her hard-to-please boss assigns her to a top-secret marketing campaign that pairs authors with corporations hungry for creative copy, Casey is initially thrilled. But as she delves deeper into the project and begins wooing her former literary idols into lucrative yet ethically troubling contracts, she can’t help but question the cost on her conscience.

With Franson’s unforgettable voice, A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out is the story of finding a young woman finding her way out of the rat race by finding her way back to her first love: literature.

Sally Franson received her education at Barnard College and the University of Minnesota. She has received recognition from The MacDowell Colony, Glimmer Train, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Ucross Foundation, among others. She lives in Minneapolis.

Leslie Jamison, author of the bestselling The Empathy Exams, will read from her new work of nonfiction, The Recovering. She will be joined for conversation by novelist V. V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction—both her own and others’—and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

At the heart of the book is Jamison’s ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, and David Foster Wallace, as well as lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison’s own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, “broken spigots of need.” It’s about the particular loneliness of the human experience—the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.


Leslie Jamison was born in Washington DC and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she's lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and Brooklyn. She's worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. These days she teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration and leads the Marian House Project.

She has also written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared in places including The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. For several years she was also a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

V. V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is the author of Love Marriage (Random House, 2008). The novel, which is set in Sri Lanka and some of its diaspora communities, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Himal Southasian, and The American Prospect, among others.

Cutter Wood’s remarkable debut is, like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a searing blend of the documentary and the literary.

The crime at the center of the story is the murder of Sabine Musil-Buehler, the owner of a local motel on Anna Maria Island off Florida’s gulf coast. Cutter Wood, freshly graduated from college and at loose ends, had been a guest at the motel just a few months before it was set on fire and Sabine went missing. When Sabine’s blood-covered stolen car is recovered by the police, they begin digging up the beach. Three men are named persons of interest—her husband, her absent boyfriend, and the man who stole the car. Wood returns to Anna Maria and is drawn steadily deeper into the case.

As Wood embeds himself in the investigation, he comes to explore not only the circumstances leading up to a woman’s death, but the very heart of darkness that can lead love down a nameless path. In “this gripping exploration of an island murder and a heartland love, Cutter Wood subverts all our expectations for the true crime genre,” says Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams. “He challenges what we mean by ‘true,’ by presenting us with feats of imagination alongside traditional reportage, and challenges how we understand ‘crime’ by asking us to consider the relationship between acts of extraordinary violence and the rhythms of our ordinary lives. Wood’s voice is smart, curious, playful, and wholly engaging.”


Cutter Wood was born in Central Pennsylvania and received his BA from Brown University, where he was awarded prizes for nonfiction and poetry. Wood completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa in 2010, during which he was awarded numerous fellowships and had essays published in Harper's and other magazines. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

John Porcellino makes his love of home and of nature the anchors in an increasingly turbulent world. He slows down and visits the forests, fields, streams, and overgrown abandoned lots that surround every city. He studies the flora and fauna around us. He looks at the overlooked. Porcellino also digs deep into a quintessential American endeavor—the road trip. Uprooting his comfortable life several times in From Lone Mountain, John drives through the country weaving from small town to small town, experiencing America in slow motion, avoiding the sameness of airports and overwhelming hustle of major cities.

From Lone Mountain collects stories from Porcellino’s influential zine King-Cat — John enters a new phase of his life, as he remarries and decides to leave his beloved second home Colorado for San Francisco. Grand themes of King-Cat are visited and stated more eloquently than ever before: serendipity, memory, and the quest for meaning in the everyday.

Over the past three decades, Porcellino’s beloved King-Cat has offered solace to his readers: his gentle observational stories take the pulse of everyday life and reveal beauty in the struggle to keep going.


John Porcellino was born in Chicago in 1968, and has been writing, drawing, and publishing minicomics, comics, and graphic novels for over twenty-five years. His celebrated self-published series King-Cat Comics, begun in 1989 and still running, has inspired a generation of cartoonists. He lives in Illinois.

About Melissa Cundieff's Darling Nova:

"Melissa Cundieff’s deeply satisfying debut Darling Nova reminds us that living and loving requires us to be circadian with how we treat memory—it is every day that we must forget to remember, and we must remember to forget. These poems are alive with tenderness, temperance, and a tempestuous willingness to engage and render what is both vivid as well as invisible. “I wrote this today:” she writes, reminding us that it is both before and after the pause that the world begins." TARFIA FAIZULLAH

Melissa Cundieff received an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University, where she was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems appear in places such as Best of the Net, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Four Way Review, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, and Tongue. Originally from Texas, she lives in St. Paul, MN.

About Sheryl St. Germain's The Small Door of Your Death:

In this brilliant, wrenchingly beautiful book, Sheryl St. Germain limns the unbearable death of her son via overdose, the agonizing history of her family’s addictions, and her own fragile recovery. With astonishing lyricism, she gives us “snow and its dark sister: a kind of brutal cold that stings you awake.” She gives us an “Ode to Needles,” in which the needles of White Spruce and Lodgepole Pine become the needles both she and her son used to inject drugs. And in “Versions of Heaven,” she takes us to a place where her musician son might be “showing the gone ones…how to scat god’s breath.” This book is an invaluable companion for anyone who has wrestled with addiction, or lost a loved one to it. St. Germain knows both the rawness of grief, and the ways we must find to go on living. She can help us learn. —Ruth L. Schwartz

The Small Door of Your Death (Autumn House, 2018) is a book of poems that addresses the current opioid epidemic, written in the voice of a mother who has lost her son to a drug overdose. It is partially based on the story of the poet’s son, who died in 2014 of a heroin overdose. The book includes both lyric and prose poems that trace the history of addiction in the poet’s family, and include poems addressing her own recovery that is almost concurrent with the son’s loss.

Originally from New Orleans and of Cajun and Creole descent, Sheryl St. Germain is a poet and essayist whose work has received numerous awards including two NEA Fellowships and an NEH grant. Her poetry books include Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, The Journals of Scheherazade, and Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems. She has written two memoirs, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, and Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair. She co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century, and with Sarah Shotland Words Without Walls: Writers on Violence, Addiction and Incarceration. Sheryl directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University and is co-founder of the Words Without Walls program.

Named a Notable Work of Fiction in 2017 by The Washington Post • One of PBS NewsHour's 5 Books from 2017 • National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree • NPR Best Book of 2017 • Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize

A luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track.

At first glance, the quirky, overworked narrator of Weike Wang's debut novel seems to be on the cusp of a perfect life: her successful, supportive boyfriend has just proposed to her, and she is studying for a prestigious PhD in chemistry that will make her Chinese parents proud (or at least satisfied). But instead of feeling happy and hopeful, she is wracked with ambivalence and stress: she doesn't know how to answer her boyfriend's marriage question, her research at the lab is foundering, and the long hours and high expectations of her program comprise an exquisite pressure cooker. When it all becomes too much and she begins breaking beakers and threatening to open the argon box to air, her life plan veers off course--and onto a new path of questions, possibilities, and discoveries about everyone and everything she thought she knew. Smart, insightful, moving, and always funny, Chemistry is a unique and contemporary coming-of-age story that is sure to evoke a winning reaction.



Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines including Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares, which also named Chemistry the winner of its John C. Zacharis Award. Weike currently lives in New York City.

Joanna R. Demkiewicz is a co-founder and the editorial director of The Riveter, a women's longform magazine. She works as a book publicist for Milkweed Editions, and a freelance editor for The Sager Group's Women in Journalism Series. Her writing has been published in Guernica and Women's eNews. She lives in Minneapolis.

Affidavits—sworn statements made under oath, usually in a court of  law: It’s a word you probably don’t associate with motherhood. But when you  read even a few pages of Laura Jean Baker’s “beautiful and brave memoir of motherhood and its discontents” (as Joyce Carol Oates has recently described it), you’ll quickly find yourself in the grip of a writer utterly committed to and brilliantly capable of getting to the very heart of her impossible predicament.

Baker discovers that bearing and having babies is the one surefire cure to her debilitating depression. But her compulsive need to mother is also the greatest threat to her marriage and to her growing family’s well-being. That which cures us is also that which ails us. Is there any more fundamentally human paradox?

In The Motherhood Affidavits, Baker’s acute sensitivity attunes her to the commonalities between her addiction-fueled experiences and those of fellow residents of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, whose often drug-addled crimes and misdemeanors her husband, Ryan, defends. In telling her own story alongside theirs, Laura Jean Baker asks us to reckon with this question: What price is each of us willing to pay to assuage the pain that life inflicts upon us?


Laura Jean Baker earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and teaches English and writing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Oshkosh, WI, with her husband and five wildly inspiring children.

John Stick, zoo keeper and giant, just wants to sit alone in a dark room with his pet tarantula. However, when ten thousand birds fall dead from the New Mexican sky, the woman he loves, an ornithologist with severe facial deformity, begs him to decipher the cause. He grudgingly agrees, a decision that plunges him into a tangle of weirdness as old as the American Southwest.

Stick’s investigation reveals that the birds’ mass death is an offshoot of a much larger conflict. On one side, the Good Friends, an underground railroad for undocumented immigrants, wants Stick to oust the man they believe responsible for killing the birds and persecuting immigrants. This same man leads The Minutemen Militia, which covets Stick’s expertise in handling their genetically mutated immigrant-tracking monsters. Meanwhile, a beautiful animal theologian tries to seduce Stick into believing his existence is key to balancing an off-kilter universe. Shady characters whisper of chupacabras loose in the desert. The exsanguinated corpses of strange beasts begin to turn up, some of them Stick’s close pals. At the center of it all lurks an enigmatic antagonist who, so they say, has harnessed the power of God in an ancient hot springs and is using it to herald doomsday.

Stick’s journey upends his stable life, shakes apart his fragile relationships, and sets him on a collision course with his family’s secret ancestry. Ultimately, as chupacabra-like monsters, Minutemen, and Good Friends head toward a final showdown, Stick must make a hard choice about his own identity and values.


Dan Darling is obsessed with the desert. Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he studies the people, the creepy-crawlies, and the geography of the sacred dry spaces. Before his current career as an award-winning professor of English, he worked as a bartender, a juggler, an IRS agent, and a magician. Dan has traveled to 20 countries and speaks several languages. His first novel Archaeopteryx hit the shelves in late 2017.

“There will be tendencies to compare this book to the Girl on the Train and its various imitators, but don’t be fooled: This is better than those. Jewell’s forte is the good old-fashioned novel of psychological suspense, the kind that keeps you reading deep into the night.”  – The Globe and Mail

Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was fifteen, the youngest of three. She was beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers. She and her boyfriend made a teenaged golden couple. She was days away from an idyllic post-exams summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her.

And then she was gone.

Now, her mother Laurel Mack is trying to put her life back together. It’s been ten years since her daughter disappeared, seven years since her marriage ended, and only months since the last clue in Ellie’s case was unearthed. So when she meets an unexpectedly charming man in a café, no one is more surprised than Laurel at how quickly their flirtation develops into something deeper. Before she knows it, she’s meeting Floyd’s daughters—and his youngest, Poppy, takes Laurel’s breath away.

Because looking at Poppy is like looking at Ellie. And now, the unanswered questions she’s tried so hard to put to rest begin to haunt Laurel anew. Where did Ellie go? Did she really run away from home, as the police have long suspected, or was there a more sinister reason for her disappearance? Who is Floyd, really? And why does his daughter remind Laurel so viscerally of her own missing girl?


Lisa Jewell was born and raised in north London, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. She is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA TODAY bestselling author of numerous novels, including The House We Grew Up In, The Third Wife, and I Found You. To find out more, visit Facebook.com/LisaJewellOfficial, or follow her on Twitter @LisaJewellUK.

About Kai Carlson-Wee's Rail:

“Rail is a lovely book, strong and inspired.” —Robert Bly

Set against a landscape of rail yards and skate parks, Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut collection captures a spiritual journey of wanderlust, depression, brotherhood, and survival. These poems—a “verse novella” in documentary form—build momentum as they travel across the stark landscapes of the American West: hopping trains through dusty prairie towns, swapping stories with mystics and outlaws, skirting the edges of mountains and ridges, heading ever westward to find meaning in the remnants of a ruined Romantic ideal. Part cowboy poet, part prophet, Carlson-Wee finds beauty in the grit and kinship among strangers along the road.

Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of Rail (BOA Editions, 2018). He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, AGNI, New England Review, Gulf Coast, and The Missouri Review, which awarded him the 2013 Editor’s Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine, and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, has screened at film festivals across the country. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.


About Gretchen Marquette's May Day:

“Emotionally raw yet sensual poems plumb the depths of nature as well as the absence of loved ones. . . . Ultimately, lessons are learned: lessons about loving, letting go, and beginning again.”—City Pages

May Day is both a distress call and a celebration of the arrival of spring. In this rich and unusually assured first collection, the poet Gretchen Marquette writes of the losses of a brother gone off to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a great love that has left the world charged with absence and grief. But there is also the wonder of the natural world: the deer at the edge of the forest, the dog reliably coaxing the poet beyond herself and into the city park where by tradition every May Day is pageantry, a festival of surviving the long winter. “What does it mean to be in love?” one poem asks. “As it turns out, / the second best thing that can happen to you / is a broken heart.”

Gretchen Marquette is the author of May Day (Graywolf Press, 2016.) Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Harper's, the Paris Review, Tin House, PBS Newshour, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis.

Since the publication of his New York Times bestseller What Got You Here Won't Get You There, business guru Marshall Goldsmith has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. But a few years ago, he realized that women often face different challenges than men as they seek to advance in their careers. After a conversation with his longtime colleague, women’s leadership expert Sally Helgesen, they decided to address these pressing needs by collaborating on How Women Rise, an invaluable guide for women eager to take the next step in their careers.

How Women Rise will help women identify specific behaviors that keep them from realizing their full potential, no matter what stage they are at in their career. It will also help them identify why what worked for them in the past will not necessarily get them where they want to go in the future -- and how to finally shed those behaviors so they can advance to the next level, whatever that may be.

How Women Rise will enable women at all stages of their career to reach new heights, aiding them in their quest to take on new challenges in the workplace, their communities, and the world.



Sally Helgesen's work is regarded as the gold standard when it comes to women's leadership. Since the publication of The Female Advantage in 1990 (still in print), she has written five more books in the field and speaks to audiences all around the world about these issues. Clients have included Microsoft, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Prudential Financial, Pfizer, Textron, Hewlett Packard, The World Bank, and dozens more. She has led seminars at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Smith College, and her work has been featured in Fortune, The New York Times, Fast Company, and Business Week. She lives in Chatham, NY.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, a ferocious, sexy, hilarious memoir about going off the rails at midlife and trying to reconcile the girl you were with the woman you've become.

As a happily married mother of two, Claire Dederer suddenly finds herself totally despondent and, simultaneously, suffering through a kind of erotic reawakening. This exuberant memoir shifts between her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of mysterious new hungers and herself as a teenager, when she last experienced life with such heightened sensitivity and longing. From her hilarious chapter titles (“How to Have Sex with Your Husband of Seventeen Years”) to her subjects – from the boyfriend she dumped at fourteen the moment she learned how to give herself an orgasm, to the girls who ruled her elite private school (“when I left Oberlin I thought I had done with them forever, but it turned out …they also edited all the newspapers and magazines, and wrote all the books”), to raising a teenage daughter herself – Dederer writes with an electrifying blend of wry wit and raw honesty. She exposes herself utterly, and in doing so captures something universal about the experience of being a woman, a daughter, a wife.

Claire Dederer is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses and Love & Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning. A book critic, essayist, and reporter, Dederer is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and has also written for The Atlantic, Vogue, Slate, The Nation, and New York Magazine, among other publications. She lives on an island near Seattle with her family.

Siri Daly is always thinking one meal ahead. Like many parents trying to feed their families, Siri is a very busy cook who churns out daily meals for her three kids and her bicoastal husband Carson Daly.  While “mom-ing” hard and loving it, the decision to write about food on her blog Siriously Delicious was a no-brainer—food has always been her passion. A Midwestern girl at heart, Siri’s childhood in Minnesota taught her that when you’re cold and stuck indoors, you eat!

In her debut cookbook Siriously Delicious: 100 Nutritious (and Not So Nutritious) Simple Recipes for the Real Home Cook, Siri shares 100 easy-to-follow recipes that are created with three goals in mind: to make food that is delicious and satisfying for both kids and adults, to prepare dishes packed with traditionally comforting flavors and ingredients (think cheese, avocado, and chocolate), and to make each recipe approachable for even a novice cook.

Siri Daly was a television writer and producer before becoming a stay-at-home mom of three young kids. She started her popular food blog, Siriously Delicious, as a place to keep track of the recipes that worked for her continuously busy life. Married to Carson Daly, she is now a regular TODAY food contributor and resident comfort-food expert, often cooking on-air with her husband. They live in the greater New York area.

CNN’s Sally Kohn is known for her ability to make friends across the political aisle. While establishing herself as a leading progressive voice as a liberal commentator on Fox News, she went head-to-head with her colleagues on divisive issues, engaging in heated arguments — and developing unexpected friendships. But since the 2016 election, even the famously nice Kohn has found herself wanting to lash out at her enemies. Where did all this hate come from?

In The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity, Kohn talks to leading scientists and researchers and investigates the evolutionary and cultural roots of hate in its most subtle and obvious forms, from implicit bias and racism to violence and full-blown genocide. She travels across the country and worldwide, interviewing fascinating people who have left extraordinary lives of hate behind. She also draws on the fields of psychology and neuroscience to explore the patterns of thinking behind hate, such as “otherizing,” groupthink, and attribution errors — and how we can circumvent them.

At a moment when Americans are facing an epidemic of animosity and incivility, The Opposite of Hate is enlightening, instructive, and hopeful, providing an optimistic look into one of the most pressing issues of our time.


Sally Kohn is one of the leading progressive voices in America today. She is a writer, activist, CNN political commentator and the host of the “State of Resistance” podcast. Before that, she was a Fox News contributor — and before that worked for over 15 years as a community organizer. Sally’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, New York Magazine, More Magazine, Elle.com, RollingStone.com, USA Today, Time, Afar Magazine and many other outlets. Her first two TED talks, which addressed the topics of practicing kindness online and finding compassion even for your fiercest political enemies, have garnered over 3 million views.

Stephanie Curtis is a senior producer at MPR News and MPR’s The Thread. You can hear her discuss movies on The Cube Critics podcast.

Calling all horse-crazy moms! This Mother's Day, join us for a unique look at a special filly who beat the patriarchy.

In the world of Thoroughbred racing, speed rules. Alexandra the Great tells one of the greatest underdog tales in American sports — how Rachel Alexandra grew from an abandoned foal to a magnificent, muscular horse with a glossy coat who flew over the track, dominating every mare she met.

Still, Rachel’s original owner refused to let her compete against male horses. When a new owner saw her potential and raced her against, bigger, stronger males, Rachel Alexandra took off like a rocket.  She went on to win the Preakness, the first filly to do so in 85 years, and the Woodward, a feat never before achieved by a filly. Starting from a scraggly, knock-kneed nothing, Rachel had grown into a true athlete. She was named 2009 Horse of the Year, broke countless records, graced the pages of Vogue, and showed people around the world exactly what it means to “run like a girl.”

Including vivid details gleaned from interviews with Rachel Alexandra’s owners, veterinarian, beloved jockey Calvin Borel, and more, Alexandra the Great gives readers an exciting and emotional look at both the humans and horses who pour their hearts and souls into the world of Thoroughbred training and racing.


Deb Aronson has been a freelance non-fiction writer since 1997. Before that she worked for a decade in university public relations. When she’s not gardening, sailing or designing her dream Derby hat (hint, it will include snack food), Deb also enjoys writing (for grown ups) about interesting people doing unusual things.

Her personal essays have appeared in Mary Englebreit Home Companion, Indy's Child and WILL radio. Her feature stories have run in Mother Jones, Illinois Times, Sailing World, and Muse magazines.

When Kevin Griffin began writing One Breath at a Time over 15 years ago, he had no idea if anyone would relate to a book making connections between Buddhism and the Twelve-Step Program. All he knew was that combining the two practices had been the key to his own recovery from addiction, and that there might be a few recovering addicts like himself who were looking to incorporate Buddhism into their own recovery program. When the book was published, Griffin was blown away by the number of people who came to it, from those who were just entering recovery, to those who had been clean for decades, to those suffering from other addictions, to the family and friends of addicts.

In One Breath at a Time, Griffin shares his own difficult journey to sobriety and how he integrated the Twelve Steps of recovery with Buddhist mindfulness practices. He examines each Step and how it relates to Buddhist teachings, and presents techniques for finding clarity and awareness. One Breath at a Time describes the convergence of two vital traditions—one ancient, the other contemporary—and shows how they work together to create a rich spiritual path.


Kevin Griffin is the author of One Breath at a Time, Recovering Joy, and A Burning Desire. A longtime Buddhist practitioner and Twelve Step participant, he is a leader in the mindful recovery movement and one of the founders of the Buddhist Recovery Network. Griffin teaches internationally in Buddhist centers, treatment centers, professional conferences, and academic settings. He lives in California.

PLEASE NOTE: reading rescheduled from 4/4. Thanks!

Joan’s neighborhood is filled with kids of all ages – a select few are considered her friends, but even they don’t know how violent Joan’s dad is. As she navigates the troubled waters of her home life, Joan becomes adept at reading her dad’s mood, trying to prevent him from inflicting harm upon her mom. But time and time again, her dad succeeds in his mission. As the violence escalates, Joan is plagued with the constant fear that her mother may die. Why is her dad so violent and why can’t he be stopped?

In this memoir, Boone is an exceptional, yet frank, storyteller who brings the reader directly into her home, providing unembellished awareness of the multiple issues that encompass domestic violence. The Best Girl is a story of abuse, but also of resilience and survival.



Joan Hicks Boone is an author and speaker from Burnsville, Minnesota. Joan is a former registered nurse who practiced in a variety of settings in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for over 32 years. Joan is currently working on her second book, The Choicemaker, a sequel to The Best Girl. For more information about Joan, visit her website at www.joanhicksboone.com.

Come join Robert Hunter as he delivers a free in-store acoustic performance and reading from his novel Relapse.


About Relapse: Rob Wildhide will become a celebrated novelist; he just knows it. But first, he’ll have to overcome writer’s block and survive a wayward trip to the Northwoods of Maine with his new bride, Annie, and her treacherous friends (raft guides are not to be trusted!).

A love story at its best and wild ride at its drunkest, Relapse careens through shaman-led weddings, car heists that lead to strange prophesies, and the inner workings of a mind rife with possibility and absolutely unaffected by the moonshine, thank you very much. Is it relapse, or is it revival? Rob Wildhide will try just about anything to find out where this story goes.



Robert Hunter is a Nashville recording artist who first gained notoriety and critical acclaim following the release of his debut EPs, Outta My Mind and Afterglow. Robert is known best for his unabashed contempt for the conventional—in any medium—and his unique brand of lyrical alt-country-rock.

Robert’s nationwide 2018 Relapse & Revival tour is the first of its kind, a mixture of the literary and lyrical promoting both a new record and a highly anticipated new novel. He lives with his wife, Becky, a former raft guide, whose recent battle with cancer was the inspiration for the tour.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • GQ • Time • The Economist • Slate • HuffPost • Book Riot

Ghost story, murder mystery, love letter to American music – White Tears is all of this and more, a thrilling investigation of race and appropriation in society today.

Seth is a shy, awkward twentysomething. Carter is more glamorous, the heir to a great American fortune. But they share an obsession with music – especially the blues. One day, Seth discovers that he’s accidentally recorded an unknown blues singer in a park. Carter puts the file online, claiming it’s a 1920s recording by a made-up musician named Charlie Shaw. But when a music collector tells them that their recording is genuine – that there really was a singer named Charlie Shaw – the two white boys, along with Carter’s sister, find themselves in over their heads, delving deeper and deeper into America’s dark, vengeful heart. White Tears is a literary thriller and a meditation on art – who owns it, who can consume it, and who profits from it.


Hari Kunzru is the author of four previous novels. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The New Yorker. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Star Wars saga is much more than the most successful film franchise of all time – it also has much to say about successful strategies and real-life warfare waged in our own time and place. Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict brings together over thirty of today’s top military and strategic experts, including generals, policy advisors, seasoned diplomats, counterinsurgency strategists, science fiction writers, war journalists, and ground‑level military officers, to explain the strategy and the art of war by way of the Star Wars films.

Each chapter provides a relatable, outside‑the‑box way to simplify and clarify the complexities of modern military conflict. Topics include planet building on Endor, the Jedi and the Senate, Yoda’s lack of strategy, the Tarkin Doctrine, and much more!

Enjoy this discussion, you will.


ML Cavanaugh is a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute and a U.S. Army strategist with global experience and assignments ranging from the Pentagon to Korea and Iraq to Army Space and Missile Defense Command. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, among other publications.

Tsu and the Outliers is a graphic novel about a non-verbal boy whose rural existence appears unbearable until rumors of a monstrous giant upend his mundane life. Tsu finds himself at the center of the mystery, as his strange metaphysical connection with the creature is revealed and they forge an unlikely friendship.

Tsu is a young hero who must balance the challenges of two separate worlds: being non-verbal and different in a small town, and having unique powers in a treacherous and fantastical world of monsters. As the dragnet closes in, Tsu is forced to choose between a dangerous path leading beyond the periphery of human perception or a life without his only friend. Tsu and the Outliers is about courage, loyalty, forks in the road, and keeping your wits about you while fighting through the scary stuff that is growing up.


E. Eero Johnson is a designer, illustrator and comic book artist from the Northern Midwest. His illustrations (as Erik T. Johnson) have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Wired. His short comics have been featured in Los Angeles Magazine, The New York Times, and Nozone. He collaborated on the hybrid novel/graphic novel Original Fake with author Kirstin Cronn-Mills for Penguin Books, and he co-published the experimental Kozmo-Knot the Never-Ending Comic Book with Uncivilized Books. Tsu and the Outliers is his first full-length graphic novel.   

In the past year alone the world has experienced profound losses in the form of rock legends, from Bowie to Prince to Tom Petty. For now, people keep flocking to classic rock shows to take in the explosive awesomeness of the remaining legendary cadre of artists — the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Black Sabbath, and the Who — that since the late 1960s have revolutionized popular culture. Still, while their songs get airtime, classic rockers are leaving the stage permanently, leaving us with the question: can classic rock stay young as its idols are dying all around us?

In Twilight of the Gods, Hyden mixes personal memoir, criticism, and journalism, standing witness as classic rock reaches the precipice. Traveling to the eclectic places where rockers are still making music, he talks to the artists and fans who have aged with them; explores the ways that classic rock has changed the culture; investigates the rise and fall of classic rock radio; and turns to live bootlegs, tell-all rock biographies, and even the liner notes of rock’s greatest masterpieces to tell the story of what this music meant, and how it will be remembered.


A staff writer at Uproxx, Steven Hyden has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Grantland, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Pitchfork, the A.V. Club, Slate, and Salon, mixing entertaining rock criticism with extensive cultural analysis. He is the author of the acclaimed Your Favorite Band is Killing Me.

Wrestling with fear doesn’t have to be a negative experience. This book offers an approach to life that unlocks a new way of thinking and being in the world, one that leads directly through the center of the anxieties we seek to avoid. 

Written in the style of an owner’s manual, a guide to being human, Burkett focuses on areas of pain and anxiety as they tend to manifest for modern people: feelings of unworthiness and issues surrounding sex, money, failure, and even death. Providing wisdom from Zen (channeled through his many experiences as a psychotherapist) and using language and metaphors from popular culture, he takes anxiety and teaches us to turn those fears into the building blocks of a fulfilling life.


Tim Burkett began practicing Zen Buddhism in San Francisco in 1964 with the renowned teacher Shunryu Suzuki (author of Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind). 

Tim is the former CEO of the largest non-profit in Minnesota for individuals with mental illness. He is a psychologist, a Zen Buddhist priest, and the Guiding Teacher of Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. He and his wife, Linda, have two grown children and two grandchildren.

Call it a brown rice revolution.

The legacy of the 1960s and 1970s is usually defined as one of leftist politics and of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But the counterculture also reshaped the way most of us eat.

Why exactly did young Americans in the 1960s start eating brown rice and whole-wheat bread? How did alfalfa sprouts, tofu, and tahini make their way to tiny towns all across the country? Why were so many children forced to eat carob candy?

The natural-foods cuisine of the 1970s didn’t emerge out of a vacuum – it gathered up a century’s worth of fringe health movements, charged them with the political spirit of the times, and infused them with the flavors of Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Hippie Food traces the surprising connections that formed this unique cuisine and tells the stories of cooks both famous and obscure. It also looks at how this food movement reshaped the way we all eat today.



Jonathan Kauffman grew up in a liberal Mennonite family in Indiana eating lentil casseroles and tofu stir-fries. As a college student at Macalester, he worked at Table of Contents, falling in love with cooking; after graduation, he moved to San Francisco, where he kept working in restaurants for a few years before leaving the kitchen for the more lucrative world of journalism.

Kauffman reviewed restaurants in the Bay Area and Seattle for 11 years. In 2015, he joined the food section at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he broadly covers the intersection of food and culture. His reporting and criticism have won awards from the James Beard Foundation, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and the International Association of Culinary Professionals, among others, and he has been a regular contributor to San Francisco magazine, Lucky Peach and the New Yorker.


Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is one of the most awarded food writers in the country. She started her career as a 13-year-old restaurant dishwasher, and, after coming to Minnesota for college, became a local restaurant, wine, and drink critic in 1997. In addition to her dining and beverage reviews for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Dara writes monthly on people, travel, health, and the environment. Her food writing has appeared in Delta Sky, Gourmet, Saveur, Food & Wine, USA Today, and Bon Appetit to name a few. Dara has been nominated for her food and wine writing 13 times for James Beard Awards, the Oscars of the food world, and has won five times.

A young man is arrested for murder in the Arkansas Delta, and his former English teacher returns to visit him. For the next seven months in county jail, they pore over novels, poems, and historical narrative by Frederick Douglass, C.S. Lewis, Marilynne Robinson, James Baldwin, W.S. Merwin and more.

Michelle Kuo’s debut memoir, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship is a story of race, inequality, and the power of literature. This relentlessly honest book asks what we owe each other, how racism and poverty shape young people's fates, and what it means to live a good life.


Michelle Kuo taught English at an alternative school in the Arkansas Delta for two years. After teaching, she attended Harvard Law School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and worked at a nonprofit for undocumented immigrants in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California, on a Skadden Fellowship, with a focus on tenants’ and workers’ rights. She also clerked for a federal appeals court judge in the Ninth Circuit. Currently she teaches courses on race, law, and society at the American University of Paris on issues related to race, punishment, immigration, and the law. She won the 2016 Board of Trustees Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Noon

Is it noon? 
A headache? 
A career?
You are my illness, my door slam, my exquisite half hour. You slide around like numbers the clock hands slide over.
It’s difficult to get a thing right without getting something else wrong.

 
“Independent, never sentimental, and unafraid of uncertainty, A Boot’s a Boot embodies the fierce struggle to maintain equilibrium in this destabilizing world…The poems focus the majority of their attention on the between-spaces of the world where time is malleable as both theory and thing: ‘We take our time, fold it in half and half again’…  Lewis’s vaulting mind does not require the suspension of disbelief, only the understanding that limitations can be nimbly dismissed…” (from American Microreviews and Interviews, a review by Laurie Saurborn Young)

The smallness of our comfort zones is pretty funny. -"The Pants Dance"


Lesle Lewis is the author of four books.  Her first book, Small Boat, won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2002. Subsequent titles include Landscapes I & II (2006), lie down too (2011) and the chapbook It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium (2012).  Her most recent book is A Boot’s a Boot, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Prize.  Lesle lives in New Hampshire. 

When stand-up comedian Laurie Kilmartin learned her dad was dying, she responded in the only way she knew how: with humor. In 2014, she made headlines by live tweeting her father’s time in hospice, bringing a touch of lightness to the devastating experience of losing her dad. Picked up by outlets like Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and Today.com, Kilmartin’s hilarious tweets took the world by storm and revealed the need for a comic interpretation of grief.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed is an honest, irreverent, laugh-out-loud guide to coping with death and dying. Filled with relatable anecdotes and practical advice, Kilmartin voices all of the insensitive things you may have thought about your dying loved one, or wanted to scream at a well-meaning friend, but didn’t. She also brings heart and humor to a topic that is too often met with solemnity and silence, despite being as complicated, messy, and emotional as any other part of our human experience.


Laurie Kilmartin is an Emmy Award-nominated writer for Conan and the cohost of The Jackie and Laurie Show. As a stand-up comedian, she has appeared on Conan, Last Comic Standing, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Comedy Central.

“A bridge shouldn’t just fall down,” Senator Amy Klobuchar said after the August 1, 2007, collapse of the Minneapolis I-35W eight-lane steel truss bridge, which killed 13 motorists, injured 145, and left a collective wound on the city’s psyche and infrastructure.

On her way to a soccer game with a fellow teammate, Kimberly J. Brown experienced the collapse firsthand, falling 114 feet in her teammate’s car to the Mississippi River. Although terrified, injured, and in shock, she survived. In this sobering memoir and exposé, Brown recounts her harrowing experience.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Brown became both an advocate for survivors and an unofficial whistle-blower about decaying infrastructure. She details her investigation and correspondence with Thornton Tomasetti engineers, including the false official account of the collapse and the eventual revelation of its real causes. In addition, she chronicles the ongoing decay of America’s bridges and the continuing challenges faced by leaders to address infrastructure problems across the country.

After nearly a decade of research into the collapse and her active and ongoing recovery from psychic and physical injuries, Brown shares her experience and answers the questions we should all be asking: Why did this bridge collapse? And what could have been done to prevent this tragedy?


Kimberly J. Brown is an IT technical writer. On August 1, 2007, she was one of the 180 people on the I-35W bridge when it collapsed. She is now an outspoken advocate for victims and survivors of the collapsed bridge.

Fierce is a bold, fascinating chronicle of one of the world’s most beloved fashion patterns—leopard print— celebrating its beauty and place in couture, and the women who have dared to wear it. Jo Weldon expertly traces the history of the iconic print from its inception as a textile to its use as a royal status symbol, popularization by flappers and starlets, and contemporary ubiquity. Featuring gorgeous full-color images, Fierce is a one-of-a-kind book and an absolute must-have for lovers of fashion, celebrity, history and pop culture.

Jo Weldon is the author of The Burlesque Handbook as well as the Headmistress of the New York School of Burlesque and an expert on contemporary burlesque, women’s issues, and fashion. Her writing on leopard print has been published in Mental Floss, Time Out New York, and The New York Times.

For more than a century, Wisconsin was known nationwide for its progressive ideas and government. It famously served as a "laboratory of democracy," a cradle of the labor and environmental movements, and birthplace of the Wisconsin Idea, which championed expertise in the service of the common good.

But following a Republican sweep of the state’s government in 2010, Wisconsin’s political heritage was overturned, and the state went Republican for the first time in three decades in the 2016 presidential election. Here is untold story behind the most shocking political upheaval in the country.

The Fall of Wisconsin is a deeply reported, searing account of how the state’s progressive tradition was undone and turned into a model for national conservatives bent on remaking the country. Dan Kaufman, a Wisconsin native who has been covering the story for several years, traces the history of progressivism that made Wisconsin so widely admired. Kaufman reveals how the “divide-and-conquer” strategy of Governor Scott Walker and his allies pitted Wisconsin’s citizens against one another so powerful corporations and wealthy donors could effectively take control of state government.

Neither sentimental nor despairing, Kaufman chronicles the remarkable efforts of citizens who are fighting to reclaim Wisconsin’s progressive legacy against tremendous odds.

“Through the microcosm of one state Dan Kaufman does a masterful job explaining what’s happened to America, and why. It’s not a happy tale, but it’s an important one.” — Jane Mayer, best-selling author of Dark Money


Dan Kaufman has written for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

From Beyoncé’s Lemonade to The Force Awakens to the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, the entertainment industry seems to be embracing the power of women like never before. But with more feminist content comes more feminist criticism—and it feels as if there’s always something to complain about.

Dianna E. Anderson’s incisive Problematic takes on the stereotype of the perpetually dissatisfied feminist. Anderson suggests that our insistence on feminist ideological purity leads to shallow criticism and ultimately hurts the movement. She proposes new, more nuanced forms of feminist thought for today’s culture, illustrated by examples from across the spectrum of popular music, movies, and TV, including Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and even One Direction.

While grounding her inquiry in pop-culture media and topics, Anderson draws on concepts of feminist theory to show how we can push for continued cultural change while still acknowledging the important feminist work being done in the pop-culture sphere today.


Dianna E. Anderson is a freelance journalist, author, and activist in women’s issues. She is a regular contributor to Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, the Establishment, Vice, and Bitch magazine. Anderson is the author of Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity.

From the author of the “compelling” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis) and critically acclaimed Everything You Want Me to Be, a riveting and suspenseful thriller about the mysterious disappearance of a boy and his stunning return ten years later.

There is a place in Minnesota with hundreds of miles of glacial lakes and untouched forests called the Boundary Waters. Ten years ago a man and his son trekked into this wilderness and never returned.

Search teams found their campsite ravaged by what looked like a bear. They were presumed dead until a decade later... the son appeared. Discovered while ransacking an outfitter store, he was violent and uncommunicative and sent to a psychiatric facility. Maya Stark, the assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection with their high-profile patient. No matter how she tries, however, he refuses to answer questions about his father or the last ten years of his life

But Maya, who was abandoned by her own mother, has secrets, too. And as she’s drawn closer to this enigmatic boy who is no longer a boy, she’ll risk everything to reunite him with his father who has disappeared from the known world.


Mindy Mejia is the author of The Dragon Keeper and Everything You Want Me To Be. She writes what she likes to read: contemporary, plot-driven books that deliver both entertainment and substance. She lives in the Twin Cities and holds an MFA from Hamline University.

All his life, Stephen O'Connor has had visions, portents of tragedies to come.  When he’s visited time and again by the vision of a great bird shot from the sky, he knows something terrible is about to happen in Tamarack County, Minnesota.  The crash of a private plane on Desolation Mountain in a remote part of the Iron Lake Reservation, which kills a U.S. senator and most of her family, confirms Stephen’s worst fears. Stephen and his father, Cork O’Connor, join a number of Ojibwe men from the Iron Lake reservation, who were the first on the scene. They’ve barely begun to sift through the smoldering wreckage when the FBI arrives and quickly assumes control of the situation, dismissing Cork, Stephen, and the other searchers.

In that far north Minnesota county, which is overrun with agents of the FBI, NTSB, DoD, and even members of a rightwing militia, all of whom have their own agendas, O'Connor, his father, and Bo Thorson, a private security consultant, attempt to navigate a perilous course. Roadblocked by lies from the highest levels of government, uncertain who to trust, facing evermore threats the deeper they dig for answers, the three men finally understand that to get to the truth, they will have to face the great menace: the beast huge and evil lurking in the woods that surround Desolation Mountain, a beast with a murderous intent of unimaginable scale.


William Kent Krueger writes the New York Times bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series. Krueger’s work has received a number of awards, including the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves.