Laura Chow Reeve at Women and Children First

Please join us in welcoming Laura Chow Reeve to celebrate her debut collection, A Small Apocalypse: Stories. For this event, Laura will be joined in conversation by Marisa Siegel. 

Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is required! By registering for this event, you agree to wear a mask throughout the duration of the event, per W&CF’s Covid-19 guidelines. 

A gorgeously wrought exploration of what it means to exist in the in-between.

In her debut short-story collection A Small Apocalypse, Laura Chow Reeve examines cultural inheritance, hybridity, queerness, and the stickiness of home with an eye for both the uncanny and the realistic: human bodies become reptilian, queer ghosts haunt their friends, a young woman learns to pickle memories, and a theater floods during an apocalyptic movie marathon. The characters in A Small Apocalypse weave in and out of its fourteen stories, confronting their sense of otherness and struggling to find new ways of being and belonging. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, these stories venture beyond the problems of constructing an identity to the frontier of characters living their truth in a world that doesn’t yet have a place for them.

LAURA CHOW REEVE is a writer and illustrator living in Richmond, Virginia. Her fiction has been published in the Rumpus, Catapult, and Joyland, among other publications. Her story in Hyphen was a 2017 winner of the Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and featured on LeVar Burton Reads.

Marisa Siegel (she/her) lives, writes, & edits in Evanston, IL. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her debut poetry chapbook FIXED STARS is out now from Burrow Press & her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the anthology BURN IT DOWN (Seal Press, 2019). Poems have recently appeared in Voicemail Poems, HAD, Autofocus, Tupelo Quarterly, the tiny, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Khôra, The Broadkill Review, & Pigeon Pages. She is senior acquiring editor for trade at Northwestern University Press, & an editor-at-large for The Rumpus.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.