Shawn Taylor is a writer, university lecturer, and communications coach and consultant. He is a lifelong music fan, and spends much of his time listening to bootlegs of his favorite bands, and trying to introduce his daughter to new music. His new book, The Alphabet for New and Expecting Fathers will be released around Father’s Day 2024.

Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her work encompasses writing, speaking, teaching, mentoring, and activism.

She is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult, which gave rise to a popular TED Talk. Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. Her third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, has been called a “groundbreakingly frank” guide to adulthood.

Julie holds a B.A. from Stanford, a J.D. from Harvard Law, an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts, and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Puget Sound. She serves on the CCA Board of Trustees.

She lives in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley, where she serves on the City Council and advocates for housing, equity, climate, and youth mental health. She and her lifelong partner Dan are parents to two twentysomethings, and they share a home with their grown son and Julie’s amazing octogenarian mother.

R. O. Kwon’s Exhibit, a novel, will publish in May 2024 with Riverhead. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize, as well as five other prizes. Kwon and Garth Greenwell coedited the bestselling anthology Kink, recipient of the inaugural Joy Award and a New York Times Notable Book.

Nayomi Munaweera is an award-winning novelist. Her debut, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region and was short-listed for the DSC Prize and Man Asia Prizes. It was chosen as a Target Book Club book. Her second novel What Lies Between Us, won the Sri Lankan National Book Award and was short-listed for the Northern California Book Prize. The Huffington Post raved, “Munaweera’s prose is visceral and indelible, devastatingly beautiful-reminiscent of the glorious writings of Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, who also find ways to truth-tell through fiction.”  She is proud of all her writing students from various MFAs and in her Writing Covens.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench (2010), Balm (2015), and most recently Take My Hand (2022). Take My Hand was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and named a Top 20 Book of the Year by the Editors at Amazon. It was awarded the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction, the 2023 BCALA Award for Fiction, and received the prestigious Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. Dolen is currently Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.

Jordan Kisner is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the essay collection Thin Places. Formerly, she was a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and her essays and features have also appeared in The Believer, n+1, the Yale Review, Harper's magazine, The Paris Review Daily, and others. She runs the interviews project and podcast Thresholds, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Bowdoin College.

Dani McClain reports on race, reproductive health, and activism. She is a contributing writer at The Nation and served as Cincinnati public library’s Writer-in-Residence in 2020 and 2021. We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood was published by Bold Type Books in 2019.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Darius Stewart is the author of Intimacies in Borrowed Light (EastOver Press, 2022) and Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir (Belt Publishing, 2024). His poetry and creative nonfiction have been featured in Arkansas International, Brink, Callaloo, Fourth Genre, Verse Daily, and others. His work was also named a Notable Essay or Literary Nonfiction in The Best American Essays 2022. Darius holds an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2021, the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame honored Darius with the inaugural Emerging Writer Award, and he was recently named a 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow. Darius lives in Iowa City with his dog, Gizmo, and is a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa.

Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, runaway witch, soul sweetener and performance artist born on Dakota land of Trinidadian and Crucian descent. Petrus’ work employs poetics and experiences re-membered via research and ancestral dreaming. Her first book, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. This year she released her first children’s book, Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmothers?, based on an abolitionist future. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an artist collective based in Minneapolis, creating space for the literary artists’ community. In all her artistic forms she explores diaspora, the erotic, the speculative, ancestral magic, stories of queerness and femmehood, wildness, laughter, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer.

About Events at M&Q:

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A transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for healing.

In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America.

Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it—to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.

With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness of spirit—not to mention a thrilling, and unrivaled, storytelling verve—Another Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, healing, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, love. It could be called a theory of life itself—a theory of being that will leave you open to the wonder of the world.

JESSICA HOPPER is a Chicago-based music journalist and documentary producer. She has been an editor at Rookie, MTV News, and Pitchfork, and her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Punk Planet, and The Village Voice.

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.

Event date: 

Tuesday, June 4, 2024 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm

Event address: 

5233 N Clark St

Join us at Pegasus Books Downtown on Thursday, May 30th at 7pm to celebrate the release of award-winning Oakland journalist Carvell Wallace's brilliant debut, Another Word for Love: A Memoir. Pegasus is thrilled to welcome Wallace for a reading and conversation with fellow Oakland writer and editor Nina Renata Aron.

Released this May from MCD Books (a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), Another Word for Love is a transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for healing. In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America. Copies of this can't-miss debut will be available for signing at the event.

Nina Renata Aron is a writer and editor based in Oakland. She is the author of Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls, a memoir and cultural history of codependency, which was published by Crown in 2020. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Poetry Foundation, The New Republic, Jewish Currents, Elle, and elsewhere. She writes a newsletter about books called Dollface. 

AUTHOR EVENT!

Sunday, May 26 @ 12:30 pm

Award-winning author Carvell Wallace will be signing copies of his new book, ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE at Walden Pond Books on Sunday, May 26, from 12:30 pm until 1:00 pm.

An acclaimed journalist and podcaster, Carvell Wallace is also the co-author of the best-selling basketball memoir The Sixth Man with Andre Iguodala. He lives in Oakland and has two adult children, a comfortable couch, and a lot of plants.

We are born, and life breaks us. We spend the rest of our lives trying to put ourselves back together. “To return, to be made whole again. This is another word for love,” writes Carvell Wallace. In Another Word for Love (MCD), Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America. What follows could be another narrow story of pain and survival, recounting hurt and centering suffering. But this is not that kind of memoir. Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and what frames it — making sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world. With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness — not to mention an unrivaled, thrilling, and stylistic storytelling verve — Another Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, for love itself. This extraordinary book is a radical meditation on healing, told through lenses of justice, sex, family, and death. It could be called a theory of life itself. Wallace will be joined in conversation by Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State.

Podcaster, journalist, and co-author of The Sixth Man with Golden State Warrior Andre Iguodala, Carvell Wallace brings his first book, a memoir touching on homelessness, queerness, and being Black in America, to the City Arts stage.

Carvell Wallace regularly contributes to the New York Times Magazine, and has written cover profiles for Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire. His intimate, often heartbreaking essays address everything from the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, to the connections between cowboy poetry and forgotten histories of Black people, to the possibility that his mother would have wanted an abortion. In 2019, Wallace co-wrote The Sixth Man with Golden State Warrior Andre Iguodala, a memoir of the basketball player’s life in the NBA. Wallace’s new memoir, Another Word For Love, looks back on his own life, from experiencing homelessness with his mother to raising two teenagers in a disturbingly violent and precarious world.

George McCalman is an artist and creative director based in San Francisco. His studio, McCalman.Co, designs brands for a range of clientele. Additionally, he’s a visual columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, featured in the “Observed” and “First Person” columns. His latest book, Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen, is a breathtaking collection of original portraits depicting Black heroes—both famous and unsung—who made their mark on activism, science, politics, business, medicine, technology, food, arts, entertainment, and more.

Experience the stories of authors who risked it all to share their compelling memoirs at the upcoming event "How They Did It: High-Stakes Memoir." Delve into the courageous journeys of Eddie Ahn, Sylvia Brownrigg, Margaret Juhae Lee, and Carvell Wallace as they fearlessly unveil tales of family, memory, ambition, healing, and love. Moderated by Rachel Howard, these intrepid authors will discuss the risks and rewards of baring their souls on the page. Join the conversation at the Page Street Co-Working space in San Francisco on April 28, 2024, and enjoy an evening of insightful discussions and casual networking, accompanied by Prosecco, wine, and fancy nonalcoholic drinks. Ticket sales proceeds will support both LitCamp and Litquake, organizations dedicated to nurturing writers and fostering a literary community. Be inspired by these brave authors as they encourage aspiring memoirists to embrace the challenge of writing their own high-stakes stories. A night not to be missed for anyone passionate about the power of storytelling.