Let’s Get Mad: Celebrate a MUTHA of a decade

UPDATE —

Due to unusual weather, this SOLD OUT event is now pivoting to zoom (just like old times, friends). Link is here, get on it at 7 —

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_u8CTKf54TlW8DsMoehAmtw. Please feel free to share! We can accommodate up to 1000 attendees on Zoom!

Y’ALL: you’re invited –

MUTHA magazine x Pen Parentis x Brooklyn Book Fest = Lit Party

Friday / September 29th

7 – 8:45 readings & signing at Books are Magic on Montague – ZOOM LINK ABOVE

9 – late, after-party with more folks from the magazine, cash bar and pizza and bocce ball at Floyd’s – THIS IS PENDING TRAINS RUNNING, LET US KNOW IF YOU’D STILL COME AND WE’LL MAKE IT OUT

We’re hosting a rager with mother-writers and artists who get real, down and dirty, and deservedly furious (and funny) about the lives of mothers (and others) (and sometimes their kids) in this world on fire. Readings by Minna Dubin (Mom Rage), Amanda Montei (Touched Out), Lisa Lim (A Darker Shade of Noir), and Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) have appeared across ten years of the radical parenting zine MUTHA, and will share pieces from newly released memoir, short fiction, and comics. Moderated by MUTHA editor-in-chief Meg Lemke and Pen Parentis’s MM De Voe (Book & Baby). More writers and artists* at the after-party at Floyd’s–put your name down for bocce ball, parents can play too.

Learn more about our friends at Pen Parentis, a literary nonprofit that helps writers stay on creative track after they have kids.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2023 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT

PS here’s a FB event link, also follow all our various social for more deets!

Minna Dubin is a writer, workshop facilitator, public speaker, and occasional public artist in Berkeley, California. She is the author of Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood (Seal Press, 2023). Her essays and reported articles on motherhood and identity have appeared in outlets like The New York Times, Salon, Parents, HuffPost, The Forward, Hobart, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is the recipient of an artist enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and has been awarded writing residencies at InCahoots, WordSpace Studios, Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Hopscotch House and Lacawac Sanctuary.

Lisa Lim is a comic storyteller born and raised in Queens, New York. Her work has been featured in Guernica, PANK, The Rumpus, PEN America, and Mutha Magazine. Her short illustrated story, “The Hunger” was featured in an anthology edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers. Find more of her storytelling here.

Amanda Montei is the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2023, the memoir Two Memoirs (Jaded Ibis Press), and a collection of prose, The Failure Age (Bloof Books), as well as co-author of Dinner Poems (Bon Aire Projects). She has an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a PhD from the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Her scholarship and criticism focuses on literary and cultural representations of gender, work, care, sexuality, feminism, creativity, and the body. Amanda’s work has been featured at/in The Cut, Romper, Mother Tongue, Slate, Electric Literature, Vox, the Rumpus, Salon, The Believer, Ms. Magazine, Poetry Foundation, and others.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

M. M. De Voe writes internationally-acclaimed speculative literary fiction and poetry. She is also the founder of the literary nonprofit Pen Parentis, and the author of the fun instructional memoir, Book & Baby, which won first place in writing/publishing at the 2021 Indie Awards. She lives in Manhattan where she spends her days reveling in irony.

Meg Lemke is the Editor-in-Chief of MUTHA Magazine, which publishes “some of the finest comics about modern motherhood” (Nat. Brut), and comics and graphic novels reviews editor at Publishers Weekly. She’s acted as series editor for the Illustrated PEN series (PEN America) and curated programs at PEN World Voices Festival, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and for the French Comics Association. Previously, she was a book editor at Teachers College Press at Columbia University, Seven Stories Press, and Houghton Mifflin, where she launched the Best American Comics series. Her writing has appeared in MUTHA, PW, The Paris Review, Seattle Review, The Atlanta Review, and Seleni, among other places. Find her @meglemke on twitter and Mastadon. She lives in Brooklyn.

Who else is gonna come party? Hang out with these fab NYC based MUTHAs at the event –

Jessica Phillips Lorenz

Kate Lynch

Johna Mandel

Sarah Moore