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Nicole McCarthy Book Launch

08/20/2022 - 7:00pm

Join us as we celebrate the release of A Summoning, the debut book by Nicole McCarthy! We'll have a book launch party, also featuring Jackie Casella, Christina Vega, and Lydia Valentine!

Can we exorcise a memory? Can we purge those that are a danger to us? Rewriting moments of trauma while coming to terms with a family in the early stages of memory loss, A Summoning muddles the line between fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, text and image. McCarthy’s collection lays the groundwork explaining the physiology of memory and how it changes in our bodies.

Nicole McCarthy is an experimental writer and artist based outside of Seattle. Her work has appeared in PANK, Hobart, The Offing, Redivider,Glass: a Journal of Poetry, a Best American Experimental Writing anthology, and others. Her work has also been performed and encountered as projection installation pieces throughout the Puget Sound.

Jackie Casella has been a resident of Tacoma and surrounding areas since she was just a glimmer. She’s has been an editorial writer with columns and articles among the pages of the Weekly Volcano, City Arts Magazine, South Sound Magazine, and Grit City Magazine. Casella was awarded the 2018 AMOCAT Award for Outreach by an Individual thanks to her work with local literary non profit & community Creative Colloquy, as founder and event producer.

Christina Vega (they/them) is a Queer Chicana poet from New Mexico. They're the publisher at Blue Cactus Press, a hybrid publisher making books that serve as community resources by Queer and BIPOC authors; they serve on the board of directors at Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association; and they self-published their debut poetry collection, Still Clutching Maps, in 2017. Christina believes we have the power to reshape our communities with principles of Emergent Strategy, transformative justice, and collective laboring of love. They believe revolution starts at home.

Lydia K. Valentine is a poet & playwright, editor & educator, director & dramaturg seeks to amplify the voices of those who are stifled, ignored, & marginalized by centering justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and access, and promoting Anti-Racist and Anti-Biased practices. She is honored to be serving as the 2021-2023 City of Tacoma Poet Laureate and proud to be a member of the distinguished group of past, present, and potential Black Poet Laureates throughout the world. Lydia’s poetry collection, Brief Black Candles, came out in 2020 (Not a Pipe Publishing). Lydia has been invited by various organizations to speak and run
workshops on topics such as equity and classroom management, social justice in the classroom, intersectionality and identity, poetry, and playwriting. Lydia is also the resident dramaturg for empathos company and Toy Boat Theatre, both women-led theater companies in Tacoma.

Event address: 
King's Books
218 St Helens Ave
Tacoma, WA 98402