Joseph Earl Thomas, author of God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer will be in conversation with Kortney Morrow at Mac's on Wednesday, June 27th at 7 pmAfter a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round-the-clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility. Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford in Philadelphia whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf.
Kortney Morrow is a poet creating from her studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from 68to05, The Academy of American Poets, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Transition Magazine. She has her MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University. In 2023, she was awarded the Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant Award from the Ohioana Library Association for her essay “The Care & Keeping of You.” When she’s not writing, she’s co-running Studio Reciprocity—a consulting collective that helps organizations and individuals heal, re-imagine, and transform.
Event address:
1820 Coventry Rd
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
Event Venue
Mac's Backs-Books On Coventry, 1820 Coventry Rd,Cleveland Heights,OH,United States
