Meg Pokrass & Jeff Friedman – Prose Poetry, Micro Stories & Flash Fiction

Join us for an evening of poetry and flash fiction with Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman.

In First Law of Holes, award-winning author Meg Pokrass delivers a stunning selection of stories from the past fourteen years of her flash fiction career, tackling themes of belonging, obsession, messy love, and loneliness with her trademark, unconventional storytelling. A sixteen-year-old transplanted Pennsylvanian navigates sunburn and heartbreak in equal measure while falling in love with a very tan ghost. A girl with drunk scribbles on her shoes searches for fragments of an old flame inside the boy at the mall food court. And a female circus contortionist, the daughter of a failed clown, comes to terms with the first law of romantic relationships: Once in a hole, stop digging.

Jeff Friedman’s Broken Signals is a wildly imaginative collection of dazzling fabulist micro tales that reveals a world of inexplicable mysteries in which we struggle to love each other and ourselves. A girl coughs out salmon fillets for the family dinner; a man can’t remember his father’s face; a man’s lover believes he’s Paul Newman…a female mime pantomimes sex with her lover, but never touches him; a flotilla of clouds sails toward the horizon, each with a dog tail ticking behind it. A husband opens the doors through which his wife sleepwalks and a white owl sews together the dreams of two lovers… Broken Signals is deeply serious and knock-out funny! As a bonus, Jeff shared the video trailer for the book.

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Meg Pokrass, visiting from Scotland, is the author of nine collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary journals including Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, and Passages North.

Poems, mini tales and translations by Jeff Friedman have appeared in numerous publications including American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, and The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022 and 2023. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. His tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press.

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This event, co-hosted by the Yankee Bookshop, is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Registration is appreciated but not required. Please email Programs@NormanWilliams.org for more information.