Past as a portal to future.
In this conversation, two award-winning, multidisciplinary authors, Tanaïs and Carvell Wallace, author of memoir Another Word for Love, explore what it means to write an archive of the past to imagine a more loving, liberated future.
They will discuss the intersecting themes in their work, as they launch Stellar Smoke, a hypnotically original, lush, and imaginative new novel by Tanaïs. In the novel, Qamar, a hustling musician from a near-future metropolitan city, returns to the island ashram of her birth after losing her apartment in a fire. Upon Qamar's arrival, she discovers VEDA, an artificial intelligence created by her late mother to hold the archive of their family's lives. The novel weaves a tapestry of the most urgent matters of our times, including climate change, refugee crises, fascism, technology, through the intimate, human experiences of family secrets, sex, spirituality, and the primordial mother-daughter bond. This discussion will probe into the fascinating nature of love and connection in this rapidly changing world, and leave us to ponder the questions: What does it mean to be the first of your kind? How does the ever-looming future force us to reckon with our lineages, and our pasts, rife with violence and war, survival and resilience?
Tanaïs (they/she) (née Tanwi Nandini Islam) is a multidisciplinary artist, novelist, memoirist, and perfumer. They are the author of In Sensorium: Notes for My People, which won the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, and offers an alternative history of South Asia through the lens of scent. Their critically acclaimed novel, Bright Lines, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They studied at Vassar College and Brooklyn College, and founded the independent artisan perfume house Studio Tanaïs. They live in New York City with their husband Mojo.
Carvell Wallace (he/they) is a writer and podcaster whose essays have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, Esquire, and Al Jazeera. Their debut memoir, Another Word For Love (FSG, 2024), is a Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction and a winner of the PEN Oakland prize. Carvell is Peabody Award nominee, a National Magazine Award Finalist, a winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism, and of the 2026 Whiting Prize in nonfiction. He lives in Oakland.