Four Stories is Back with SHUBHA SUNDER, SAM WITT, MARIA PINTO and EMILY FRANKLIN

Mark your calendars! The next Four Stories is back at a new venue: The Burren in Davis Square.

Readers are: SHUBHA SUNDER, SAM WITT, MARIA PINTO and EMILY FRANKLIN

Shubha Sunder is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, a Grub Street instructor, and an associate fiction editor of West Branch. Her writing has appeared in Lenny Letter, Crazyhorse, Narrative Magazine, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She recently completed her first novel, titled Boomtown Girl, set in her hometown of Bangalore, India.

Sam Witt is the author of three poetry collections, including Everlasting Quail, winner of the Katherine Nason Bakeless Prize, and 2018’s Little Domesday Clock. Witt has published widely, edited the poetry anthology Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet, and has won the Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Pitch Poetry Award and the Meridian Editors’ Prize. Witt is currently Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing at Framingham State University.

Maria Pinto studied creative writing at Brandeis University. She’s been awarded fellowships by the Writers’ Room of Boston and The Mastheads, and her work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Cleaver, and FriGG, among other journals. When she’s not reading fiction for FLAPPERHOUSE or walking dogs, she’s in the woods hunting mushrooms.

Emily Franklin is the author of numerous books for adults and for teens. Her work has been published in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, read aloud on National Public Radio, named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and long-listed for the London Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

Local author event with novelist MICHELLE HOOVER, memoirist PATRICIA HORVATH, and poet SAM WITT

Join Porter Square Books for a night with Grubstreet’s MICHELLE HOOVER (Bottomland), award-winning memoirist PATRICIA HORVATH (All the Difference), and English poet/journalist SAM WITT (Everlasting Quail).

At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland follows the Hess family in the years after World War I, as they attempt to rid themselves of the Anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.

HORVATH’s transformation from a visibly disabled young woman to someone who, abruptly, “passes” for able-bodied, reveals cultural and personal tensions surrounding disability and creates an arc that connects imprisonment to freedom. What transpires is both suffocating and liberating. HORVATH’s confinement keeps her from being seen, but also cocoons a deeply personal sense of self-hood and relationship.

In Everlasting Quail, WITT combines diverse conventions such as the confession and the sexual love poem, with structures and language to invent a psycho-political landscape in which the physical world is transformed and the energy of human relationships celebrated. What holds these poems together is not the act of confession, description, or memory. Rather, they draw their vocabulary from a perpetually transformative relationship with the physical world, and with human beings, which, when merged, approaches transfiguration.

This event is free and open to the public.