Reading Series 2024-2025

The Bryn Mawr Reading Series brings major American and international writers in all literary genres to engage with students and the Philadelphia area community.

For more information, visit the Reading Series page on the BMC website, where you can also sign up for the Arts at Bryn Mawr mailing list.

Ghost Forest

Ghost Forest
$27.99

by Kimiko Hahn

ON CAMPUS - February 5


 

Opening with forty-three new formally inventive poems and leading the reader back in time through selections from her ten previous volumes, The Ghost Forest offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of a writer's artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating her personal history. Exploring the mysteries of science, nature, and the experiences of contemporary womanhood, Hahn both reinvents classic Japanese forms and experiments with traditional Western ones. Braided into the poems and narrative thread, a series of photos transforms the new-and-selected into a hybrid autobiography. This arresting collection derives new beauty from long-gone remnants.

A Riotous Disorder
She mistakes one word for another--
Something her brain naturally concocts.
Her unruly gray matter and her heart
Mistake one word for an other--
Razor for river, cistern for sister.
Even cock for clock.
She mistakes one word for a mother--
A safe her brain naturally unlocks.--

ISBN/SKU: 
9781324086062
Publication Date: 
October 15, 2024
Author: 
Publisher: 

Milk Blood Heat

Milk Blood Heat
$17.00

by Dantiel W. Moniz

ON CAMPUS - February 26


 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AND PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM AWARDS

 

A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35

 

"Electric."--TIME

 

"Enchanting."--Elle

 

"Thrilling."--Glamour

 

"Downright magical."--Boston Globe

 

"Not only be read but felt. Like Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff, Moniz is unafraid to expose the darkened corners of the Sunshine State, and of female desire."--O, The Oprah Magazine

 

A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree and one of one of the most anticipated books of the year for Elle; Entertainment Weekly; BuzzFeed; O, The Oprah Magazine; Essence; and The Millions, among many others, Dantiel W. Moniz's Milk Blood Heat follows a cast of young girls, women, and men in Northern Florida who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning and the joys and pains of everyday life. This is an incendiary debut collection by an important new voice in literature.

 

"Stunning."--Tampa Bay Times

 

"In Moniz's collection, the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment... Entire stories seem bathed in a warm radiance."--New York Times

 

"Outstanding."--Atlanta Journal Constitution

 

"Prose that is both nuanced and so lush you can taste it."--Shondaland

 

 

ISBN/SKU: 
9780802159441
Publication Date: 
February 8, 2022
Author: 
Publisher: 

Lucky Ones

Lucky Ones
$30.00

by Zara Chowdhary

ON CAMPUS - March 25


 

A moving memoir by a survivor of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India that delicately weaves political and family histories in a tribute to her country's unique Islamic heritage--"a must-read in our warring world today" (NPR)

"A harrowing survivor's tale, an important history lesson, and a desperate warning from someone who has seen the tragic effects of ethnic violence."--Time

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

In 2002, Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India's fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claims the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers and upends the life of five million Muslims. Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens. The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, will later be accused of fomenting the massacre, and yet a decade later, will rise to become India's prime minister, sending the "world's largest democracy" hurtling toward cacophonous Hindu nationalism.

The Lucky Ones traces the past of a multigenerational Muslim family to India's brave but bloody origins, a segregated city's ancient past, and the lingering hurt causing bloodshed on the streets. Symphonic interludes offer glimpses into the precious, ordinary lives of Muslims, all locked together in a crumbling apartment building in the city's old quarters, with their ability to forgive and find laughter, to offer grace even as the world outside, and their place in it, falls apart.

The Lucky Ones entwines lost histories across a subcontinent, examines forgotten myths, prods a family's secrets, and gazes unflinchingly back at a country rushing to move past the biggest pogrom in its modern history. It is a warning thrown to the world by a young survivor, to democracies that fail to protect their vulnerable, and to homes that won't listen to their daughters. It is an ode to the rebellion of a young woman who insists she will belong to her land, family, and faith on her own terms.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780593727430
Publication Date: 
July 16, 2024

Ward Toward

Ward Toward
$20.00

by Cindy Juyoung Ok

ON CAMPUS - April 2


 

Yale Younger Poet Cindy Juyoung Ok resolutely searches for hope in spaces of fragmentation

 

"Ok's métier in this lovely debut is an elegantly discursive, analytical style studded with ironies."--David Woo, Literary Hub

 

"There are places," Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, "where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed."

 

In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality's language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer.

 

Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's resolute, energized debut shifts language's fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780300273922
Publication Date: 
March 5, 2024
Author: 
Publisher: 

This Other Eden

This Other Eden
$17.99

by Paul Harding

ON CAMPUS - April 9


 

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.

During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community's fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah's Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark.

In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781324074526
Publication Date: 
December 19, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Tinkers

Tinkers
$17.99

by Paul Harding

ON CAMPUS - April 9


 

Special edition of Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel--featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside

In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

The story behind this New York Times bestselling debut novel--the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award nearly thirty years before--is as extraordinary as the elegant prose within it. Inspired by his family's history, Paul Harding began writing Tinkers when his rock band broke up. Following numerous rejections from large publishers, Harding was about to shelve the manuscript when Bellevue Literary Press offered a contract. After being accepted by BLP, but before it was even published, the novel developed a following among independent booksellers from coast to coast. Readers and critics soon fell in love, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel's remarkable success "the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory."

That story is still being written as readers across the country continue to discover this modern classic, which has now sold over half a million copies, proving once again that great literature has a thriving and passionate audience.

Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: Enon and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers. He teaches at Stony Brook Southampton.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781942658603
Publication Date: 
January 1, 2019
Author: 

Ghost Of

Ghost Of
$14.50
Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space.
ISBN/SKU: 
9781632430526
Publication Date: 
March 13, 2018
Author: 
Publisher: 

Inheritance

Inheritance
$15.25

by Taylor Johnson

ON CAMPUS - February 26


 

Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self's struggle with definition and assumption.
ISBN/SKU: 
9781948579131
Publication Date: 
November 10, 2020
Author: 
Publisher: 

Root Fractures

Root Fractures
$18.00
*One of LitHub's Poetry Books to Read in 2024*
*One of The Millions's Must Read Poetry Books of Winter 2024*

National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second poetry collection, a haunting of a family's past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations.

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives.

As Terrance Hayes writes, "'There is nothing that is not music' for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences, and ruptures of history." This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781668031308
Publication Date: 
January 30, 2024
Author: 
Publisher: 

Shuggie Bain

Shuggie Bain
$16.98

by Douglas Stuart

ON CAMPUS - October 9


 

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD


A stunning debut novel by a masterful writer telling the heartwrenching story of a young boy and his alcoholic mother, whose love is only matched by her pride.


Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.


Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamorous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.


A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Édouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780802148506
Publication Date: 
October 13, 2020
Author: 
Publisher: