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Come on down to Auntie's to meet THREE authors, poet Weston Morrow, fiction author Chris Vanjonack, and memoirist/poet Maya Jewell Zeller!You can read more about their books below, but for a quick hook...
Cloud Builder: What do we owe the dead? And what do we--who will soon be dead--owe the living?
Out of Body: A wildly inventive collection of interconnected speculative stories—spanning the multiverse, demonic attachment, and life after death—from an electrifying new voice in fiction.
Raised by Ferns: Born in a Pacific Northwest gas station to itinerant, countercultural parents
If those don't catch your attention, I don't know what will! We hope to see you here!
Friday, October 9th at 6PM at Auntie's Bookstore
(402 W Main Ave)
This event is free and open to the public.
RSVP via the button to the right.
(RSVP not required)
About Cloud Builder
What do we owe the dead? And what do we--who will soon be dead--owe the living?
These are the questions at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington State, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past.
These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt "the past, who can't stop turning back / for one last look"?
About Weston Morrow
Weston Morrow is the author of the poetry collection Cloud Builder (University of Georgia Press, Sept. 1, 2026), winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series. His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in English Literature from Central Washington University. He grew up in and around Tacoma, Washington. A former print journalist, he teaches writing at The Ohio State University. He can be found online at westonmorrow.com
About Out of Body
A wildly inventive collection of interconnected speculative stories—spanning the multiverse, demonic attachment, and life after death—from an electrifying new voice in fiction.
An aimless ghost haunts his ex-girlfriend for evidence that she’s actually upset about his death.
A group of teens discovers a machine that purports to predict the best day of its users’ lives.
A young woman is horrified to discover that an aggressive stranger she met on a night of bar-hopping now manifests in every photo that is taken of her.
A drunken posse descends into the woods in search of clowns that have been terrorizing their small town.
Chris Vanjonack’s fiction is haunted not only by specters of death, but by the elusive questions of life, and above all, the wonder and horror of the infinite. Uncanny, surreal, and infectiously clever, the stories in this linked collection contain horrors great and small, fueled as much by the fantastic as by longing, dread, and all-too-human frailties.
Morbidly funny and brilliantly observed, Out of Body is an atmospheric, dead original feast for the senses.
About Chris Vanjonack
Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Denver, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in One Story, The Book of the Month Club's Volume 0, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Out of Body is his first book.
About Raised by Ferns
Born in a Pacific Northwest gas station to itinerant, countercultural parents, Maya Jewell Zeller came of age in a landscape where poverty, wildness, and self-reliance intertwined. Raised by Ferns traces the path of a feral girl craving both freedom and safety to a middle-class adult life shaped by academia, motherhood, and uneasy privilege.
Refusing tired narratives of bootstrap triumph, Zeller instead renders rural America with intimate complexity. She writes with sharp lyricism and attention about what it means to live between worlds—material scarcity and cultural wealth, inherited distrust and institutional legitimacy. From leaking rentals to library stacks, from ferns and fire codes to scholarship and marital strife, Zeller’s life resists easy packaging yet finds form in layered essays that explore the complicated pursuit of belonging.
Raised by Ferns offers a vital, compelling new take on the forces that shape identity and the choices that define home. It is a story of survival, but more importantly, of questioning for what—and who—it is worth surviving.
About Maya Jewell Zeller
A 2024 Washington State Artist Trust Fellow, Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of out takes/ glove box (New American Press, 2023), chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the 2022 New American Poetry Prize; and co-author of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration, with visual artist Carrie DeBacker, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017). Earlier collections include the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015) and Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). She is also co-editor of Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses From the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Writing Fellowship from Oxford, and a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work in Madrid, as part of the Unamuno Author Festival, and at the University of Oxford. Maya serves as Professor for Central Washington University and Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University. She lives in the Inland Northwest with her children.
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Event venue
402 W. Main Ave., Spokane, WA, United States, Washington 99201
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