Babylon Salon
presents a special
online performance
Saturday, December 5, 2020
5pm PST / 8pm EST
featuring
2020 Booker Prize winner
(Shuggie Bain; Found Wanting; The Englishman)
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish - American author. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, was published in 2020 and is the winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. Stuart wrote Shuggie Bain over a ten year period and is currently at work on his second novel, Loch Awe. His short stories, Found Wanting, and The Englishman, were published in The New Yorker magazine. His essay, Poverty, Anxiety, and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature was published by Lit Hub. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and since 2000 he has lived and worked in New York City.
(Heads of the Colored People: Stories)
Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s “The Organist,” The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and other publications. Her short story “Heads of the Colored People…” won StoryQuarterly’s 2016 Fiction Prize, judged by Mat Johnson. Her writing has received support from Callaloo, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
(Find Layla; The Book of Etta; Book of the Unnamed Midwife)
Meg Elison is one of the fearless “bad girls” in science fiction, fantasy, and transgressive humor. She is an iconoclast, using a caustic new talent to spotlight hitherto off-limits subjects like gender roles, body shaming, female oppression, and political correctness. A high school dropout, Meg Elison bluffed her way into California community colleges and eventually graduated from UC Berkeley. She has written and spoken extensively on the poverty and early queer identity that came to inform much of her work. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. She is a co-producer of the monthly reading series Cliterary Salon.
(Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun; In Dependence)
Sarah Ladipo Manyika is a novelist whose works have been translated into six languages. Her debut novel, In Dependence, is an international bestseller while her second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize and the California Book Awards. Her nonfiction includes personal essays and intimate profiles of people she meets from Michelle Obama to Pastor Evan Mawarire and Margaret Busby. Sarah serves on the Board of the women’s writing residency, Hedgebrook, and is currently a juror for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2021 Aspen Literary prize. She is host of the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) Conversations Across the Diaspora series (Conversations Across the Diaspora hosted by Sarah Ladipo Manyika - MoAD Museum of African Diaspora). Previously, Sarah served on MoAD’s Board, lectured at San Francisco State University, was the Founding Books Editor for ozy.com, and juror for the California Book Awards as well as Patron for the Pan-African Etisalat Prize for Literature. Sarah studied at the universities of Birmingham and Bordeaux, and received her her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She was raised in Nigeria and has lived in Kenya, France, Zimbabwe, and England.
with music by
Rock vocalist Rachel "Lightning" Rose is best known for her performances with Jefferson Starship and George Clinton, and is an alumni of the world-famous Berklee College of Music. Her powerful vocals and surrealistic songwriting make for an immersive and chilling experience unlike anything else in popular music.
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Free Admission!