About this Event
Diana Xin presents her debut short story collection Book of Exemplary Women, in which a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they navigate unspoken regrets and unfulfilled desires, alongside writers Lauren Davis and Katie Prince.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.
In Book of Exemplary Women, Diana Xin’s debut short story collection, a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they navigate unspoken regrets and unfulfilled desires. Teen girls grapple with grief as they face the end of childhood and other losses. Young lovers confront the future while old lovers excavate the past. Mothers and daughters perceive each other in new ways as time reshapes their relationship. Across different stages of life, women strain against the expectations that rule their lives with quiet rebellion, bending and breaking to find new forms large enough to contain all that they carry. Together, their voices resist erasure, tracing how women hold themselves and each other intact. To create the cracks that expand possibility and challenge limitations, Xin presents both realist stories and their shadows--distortions upon the same themes with elements of magic, from light-touch hauntings to imagined literary trysts. Her characters defy the erasure common to stories about women. When they step off the page, they do so with defiance, laughing and raging as they slip beyond reach.
Born in the Hebei province of China and raised in the American Midwest, Diana Xin's work appears in Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana and has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Mineral Arts & Residencies, the M Literary Residency in Beijing, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Book of Exemplary Women (YesYes Books, 2025) is her debut collection of short stories.
Lauren Davis is the author of the short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), and the poetry books Home Beneath the Church and When I Drowned. She has been a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, the Big Other Book Award for Fiction, and others. She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. The Nothing, Lauren Davis’s debut fiction collection, exists on the whisper between reality and illusion. Think Shirley Jackson's characters stuck in the damp Pacific Northwest or an Olympic Peninsula funhouse mirror held up to Karen Russell's Florida. The worlds Davis creates acknowledge the terror and seek the gifts of solitude, grief, and the unrelenting thirst for certainty within us all.
Katie Prince is a poet and essayist. Her first poetry book, Tell This to the Universe, won the 2021 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books, and was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and the Washington State Book Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, New South, Fugue, the Adroit Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. There is an absence at the heart of Katie Prince’s debut collection, Tell This to the Universe, and an obsessive search to find what’s missing. Like moons around faraway planets, the poems orbit the strange and brutal landscapes of longing, alienation, and grief as they move through physics to philosophy, linguistics to mathematics, fairy tales to science fiction. It could be said that this book is trying to find god—to name it, to hurt it or hold it, to make desperate demands of it—but it’s just as true to say it’s looking for a home, a family, an answer to a question it still doesn’t know how to ask.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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