L-R: Reema Rajbanshi, Lara Ehrlich, and Tracy Daugherty
Red Hen Press in Pasadena is hosting a Virtual Reading and Conversation series as part of its Hen House at Home Presents, featuring the publication house’s Fall Book Tour, with several recognized authors discussing their published work online.
The series begins on Tuesday, October 13 at 4 p.m., when authors Reema Rajbanshi, Lara Ehrlich, and Tracy Daugherty share their stories and discuss their journeys, and continue on Tuesday nights through October 27 on Facebook Live.
Reema Rajbanshi is a creative and critical writer whose short fiction explores the contours of girlhood, violence, immigration, and landscape through semi-experimental forms. She is the author of “Sugar, Smoke, Song,” a collection of nine linked stories set in the Bronx, California, India, and Brazil. Following the secrets and passions of young women, these stories and their narrators cross genres and rules to arrive at unforeseen lives.
Her writing has been published in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Confrontation, and Southwest Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection won the 2015 Maurice Prize Fiction contest, was runner-up for the 2017 2040 Books contest, and won the 2018 Women’s Prose Prize for Red Hen Press.
Rajbanshi completed her BA at Harvard University, her MA at UC Davis, and her PhD at UC San Diego. She currently teaches at Haverford College.
Lara Ehrlich is the author of the short story collection, “Animal Wife,” which was selected as the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award by New York Times bestselling author Ann Hood, who says the book “made [her] dizzy with its exploration and illumination of the inner and outer lives of girls and women.” Ehrlich’s writing appears in StoryQuarterly, Hunger Mountain, the Massachusetts Review, and the Columbia Review, among others, and has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. She has attended the Bread Loaf and Tin House writers’ conferences, and received a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
Ehrlich is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Boston University, and she lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter.
Tracy Daugherty is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestseller, “The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion.” He is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University. His short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, British Vogue, the Paris Review online, McSweeney’s, and many other journals. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Corvallis, Oregon with his wife, writer Marjorie Sandor.
His book, “High Skies,” recounts the collision of devastating weather, Cold War suspicion, tense race relations, and the unintended consequences of good intentions in a small West Texas town in the 1950s, changing the futures of the families there and altering their perceptions of America. At the center of this perfect storm is Raymond “Flyboy” Seaker, a respected military veteran, now the vice principal of a school in which Troy, who tells the story, and his disabled friend Stevie will have their lives upended forever. Through a combination of his own well-meaning ambitions and the political maneuverings of others, Flyboy and the families he serves come to grasp the meaning of community and of individual fortitude.
Written with a vivid economy recalling Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” and painting as indelible a portrait of small town life as Larry McMurtry’s “The Last Picture Show,” “High Skies” is a perfectly distilled American epic.
To be able to access the show on Tuesday, follow www.facebook.com/events/767297920670473 or check the events calendar on www.redhen.org.
You may also watch the series on Red Hen Press’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/RedHenPressBeats
