Named The "Soul Child" by COACHELLA Magazine, R&B/Soul singer Cameron Calloway has a spirit & energy that is reminiscent of Motown & classic Soul music. "His voice has never been formally trained, which works to the benefit of his uplifting and heartfelt tunes, all of which radiate with warmth and authenticity." - AFROPUNK Magazine.

This event is free and open to all ages.

Black Mountain Institute, the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival, and The Writer's Block are proud to present passionate activist and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams, recipient of fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations and winner of the Sierra Club's John Muir Award. Williams will discuss her most recent book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing, a deft intersection of assaults on public lands alongside an erosion of commitment to the open space of democracy, in conversation with Téa Obreht.
 

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place among others. She is a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. She is the Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
 

Téa Obreht's debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire among many others. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York with her husband, and teaches at Hunter College.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

THE AUTHOR OF HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES IN CONVERSATION WITH NIELA ORR

Black Mountain Institute and The Writer’s Block are proud to present Carmen Maria Machado, whose debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Machado will read from and discuss her genre-bending memoir, In the Dream House—an account of a relationship gone toxic, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms of psychological abuse. Machado will discuss her work with The Believer’s deputy editor, Niela Orr.
 

Carmen Maria Machado’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Believer, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. A 2019 Gugenheim Fellow, Machado is currently the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Niela Orr is a Deputy Editor of The Believer, a columnist at The Baffler, and a contributing editor of The Organist podcast. A 2019 Eleanor Kagi Foundation Writer-in-Residence at the Black Mountain Institute, her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, BuzzFeed, Elle, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, and McSweeney's Quarterly.

This event is free and open to the public.

AN EVENING WITH 2020 SHEARING FELLOWS KRISTEN ARNETT AND LISA KO

Incoming Black Mountain Institute Fellows Kristen Arnett (Mostly Dead Things) and Lisa Ko (The Leavers) kick off their residencies with an evening of readings and conversation
 

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer and the author of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestselling debut novel, Mostly Dead Things. A columnist for Literary Hub, her work has also appeared in North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, Tin House/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award.

Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She was also a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, and the 2017 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Ko's writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and O The Oprah Magazine. Born in Queens and raised in New Jersey, she lives in Brooklyn.

This event is free and open to the public.

THE AUTHOR OF REAL LIFE IN CONVERSATION WITH DREW COHEN

Black Mountain Institute and The Writer’s Block are proud to present fiction writer Brandon Taylor, whose debut novel, Real Life, explores intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town. Taylor will discuss his work with Drew Cohen, co-owner of The Writer’s Block.
 

Brandon Taylor is the associate editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has received fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop.  He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. 

This event is free and open to the public.