About this Event
Join us for a reading and conversation with Luke Kennard, author of the Booker shortlisted novel Black Bag! Luke will be joined by author Rasheed Newson (There's Only One Sin in Hollywood).
About the participants:
Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His poetry collection, Cain, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as “the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year,” and Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021. The Transition, his first novel, was BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His most recent poetry collection, The Book of Jonah, was published by Picador in 2025 and Black Bag, his third novel, was published by John Murray and Zando in 2026 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Birmingham.
Rasheed Newson is the author of the historical novels and national bestsellers There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood and My Government Means to K*ll Me. There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood was a 2026 finalist for the Martin Cruz Smith Award from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Rasheed’s debut novel, My Government Means to K*ll Me, was a Lambda Literary finalist for Gay Fiction and was named one of the “The 100 Notable Books of 2022” by the New York Times. Rasheed was a 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. He is also a television drama writer, producer, and showrunner. He co-developed and was an executive producer of Bel-Air. He currently lives with his husband and their two children in Pasadena.
About the book:
An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?
In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. Dr. Blend wants to know: how will his students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures?
The role, eagerly accepted, soon yields unexpected consequences, from a professor of post-humanism developing research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—to the actor’s childhood friend forming a vision for monetizing this unique new situation. In the end, only Black Bag will be able to say what it all means . . .
A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
Event venue & nearby stays
Village Well Books & Coffee, 9900 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, United States
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