Tag Archives: Author Talk

Word Up Recirculation: Book Launch: Ellen Hagan & David Flores’s TELL ME EVERY LIE with Renée Watson

Tuesday, June 24, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

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Word Up celebrates the launch of local authors Ellen Hagan and David Flores’s Tell Me Every Lie, a moving, layered young adult novel in two voices about finding truth in the lies we tell ourselves. There will be a reading, Q&A, and special guests to celebrate the launch. In conversation with Hagan & Flores will be Renée Watson, author of All the Blues in the Sky.

“A simmering romance in which two recent high school graduates at an elite resort endeavor to reinvent themselves by telling lies-and maybe fall in love. The protagonists remain sympathetic even amid their mutual deceit, while the cozy plot builds to a compassionate, mature, and surprising resolution.” —Publishers Weekly

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

John Paul Reyes wants to escape the worst truths in his life-other people’s pity since his dad died, and everyone else’s expectations about what he should do with his life now that he’s graduated high school. When he arrives at the Majestic Mountain resort with his Tita Abrigo’s wealthy family, he sees a way to escape-he can be JP Abrigo, rich and set, and he can lie his way to feeling fine.

Mia Malik is trapped in this town, working hard at the resort, trying to escape her broken family and to make her way to the prestigious art program she was accepted into. She’s desperate to afford her way there, and she’s sick of the privileged guests who have the whole world open to them, who don’t really even see her.

But then another staffer dares Mia to make one of the guests fall for her. If she can, she’ll collect enough money to get out. Mia knows this is dangerously against the rules, and doesn’t even want to pretend to like an entitled rich kid, but then she meets JP. Lying to him starts off easy, but then there’s more to him than she expected. And the way JP feels about Mia? So real. As their week together runs out, Mia and JP will have to dig themselves out from the lies they tell to see if there’s any truth in the feelings they have for each other.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her books include: Crowned, Hemisphere, Watch Us Rise (YA collaboration with Renée Watson), Blooming Fiascoes, Reckless, Glorious, Girl, Don’t Call Me a Hurricane, All That Shines and Tell Me Every Lie (YA collaboration with David Flores forthcoming from Bloomsbury, Spring 2025). Ellen’s poems and essays can be found in: So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, Creative Nonfiction, Underwired Magazine, She Walks in Beauty, Small Batch, Southern Sin, ESPNW and Oprah Daily. She is the recipient of a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the 2013 NoMAA Creative Arts Grant and received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. National arts residencies include The Hopscotch House and Louisiana Arts Works. Ellen is Head of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program (founded in partnership with Ambassador Caroline Kennedy) with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines. www.ellenhagan.com @ellenhagan

David Flores is a photographer, filmmaker, and educator. His images can be found on the covers of Poets & Writers, Scalawag, and PLUCK. His work has been showcased at The Kentucky Center, The Verbal Arts Centre of Northern Ireland, and film festivals across the country. In 2018, David began work on “Nueva Bronx: 21st Century Families” — bringing free family portraiture to Railroad Park in the Bronx. This project is his response to recent nationalist movements that have attempted to remove and erase familial representations of immigrants and people of color. David believes that family, in all of its beautiful forms, stands as a cornerstone of the human experience, creating intersections between past, present and future and simultaneously weaving larger connections in the community. David is a regular guest artist of the Digital Age Learning Institute, the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, and the Alice Hoffman Young Writer’s Retreat at Adelphi University. Recent arts residencies include ArtBuilt, Global Writes, Louisiana Arts Works, and the DreamYard Project. David lives in Manhattan with his partner and children.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Her novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award. Her books include the Ryan Hart series, Some Places More Than Others, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, cowritten with Ilyasah Shabazz, Watch Us Rise, cowritten with Ellen Hagan, and Love Is a Revolution, as well as acclaimed picture books: Summer Is Here, Maya’s Song, The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, written with Nikole Hannah-Jones, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, and Harlem’s Little Blackbird, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Renée splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City.

Word Up Recirculation: Hudson Pier Women in Poetry and Memoir

Sunday, June 1, 2025 – 4:00pm to 5:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

Book releases:
Melting in Your Mouth by Chocolate Waters 
Harlow/Smith Postcards by Stephanie Dickinson

Three women writers (two from Hell’s Kitchen, one from Washington Heights) share their work in poetry and memoir, drawing from their work together in a writing group that met for over ten years. Chocolate Waters, one of the earliest published lesbian poets, will read selections from her latest book, Melting in Your Mouth, a collection of her early work and her recently published memoir.  Stephanie Dickinson, a gifted lyric writer who writes of both rural and urban life and of violence against women will read from her autobiographical novel Half Girl and her most recent poetry collection Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black and White. Sharon Silber will read autobiographically based early poems from her collection The Canadian Geese Consider Their Situation and some of her current work. We will also read a brief selection from the work of our late colleague Nicholas Johnson, a noted poet and a member of the group, who lived in Washington Heights.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

Chocolate Waters has been publishing her poetry for over four decades. She was one of the first openly lesbian poets to publish her work and her contribution has been documented in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975 (U of Il. Press, Barbara Love, Ed.). Her first three collections: To The Man Reporter From The Denver Post, Take Me Like A Photograph and Charting New Waters are considered classics of the early women’s movement and are collected in the forthcoming Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work of Chocolate Waters. In addition to her work as a writer, Waters was also a founder of the early feminist newspaper, Big Mama Rag, which was produced in Denver, Colorado from 1972-1982.  Her poetry, which has won many individual awards in addition to being nominated for several Pushcart prizes, is widely published and anthologized. Hailed as the “Poet Laureate of Hell’s Kitchen,” Waters is also a pioneer in the art of performance poetry. Her memoir, Muddying the Waters was published last year.

Stephanie Dickinson lives in New York City. Her novels Half Girl and Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil Press, as is her feminist noir Love Highway. Half Girl, searing and gorgeously written, presents an autobiographically-based account of her experience being shot in the face as a victim of intimate partner violence. Stephanie has published 14 books (thus far) and has had her poetry and short stories appear in over 150 literary journals. Her latest published book is Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black and White, published in 2024.

Sharon Silber is a retired child and adult psychologist and long-time human rights activist who had the privilege of joining the Hudson Pier Poets writing group, meeting together for about ten years. During that time, she published poems in Mind the Gap, Salonika and Skidrow Penthouse and performed her poetry around the New York metropolitan area. Her chapbook, The Canadian Geese Consider their Situation was published by Linear Arts Press. She has participated in human rights missions to Bosnia and she taught a course at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia on treating trauma in children and their families. She has taught psychology courses at Tulane University, Boston University, and the University of Michigan. She is currently writing an autofictive memoir of her grandmother, who was murdered at the age of 70 in the summer of 1941 in Keidan, Lithuania, killed by a fascist paramilitary unit composed of her neighbors. Sharon lives in Washington Heights with her husband and son.

Nick Johnson (1944-2019) was an accomplished poet who was also a member of the Hudson Pier Poets. His verse was published in journals including American Poetry Review, Shenandoah, American Letters and Commentary, The Journal, Pivot, Yearbook of American Poetry. and The Paris Review. His book Degrees of Freedom was published by Bright Hill Press. “Nicholas Johnson is a poet of incandescent wit… I love his work for its dark, sotto voce originality.”-Dennis Nurkse. For the last ten years or so of his life, Nick lived in Washington Heights.

Word Up Recirculation: Caro de Robertis’s SO MANY STARS with Denne Michele Norris

Wednesday, June 4, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

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Word Up welcomes acclaimed writer Caro de Robertis to celebrate So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color, a first-of-its-kind, deeply personal, and moving oral history of a generation of trans and gender nonconforming elders of color who tell their own stories of breathtaking courage, cultural innovations, and acts of resistance. In conversation with de Robertis will be Denne Michele Norris, author of When the Harvest Comes.

“Insightful and educative… Each personal history is notable in its own scope and perspective, but collectively these voices representing elder queer generations of color become extraordinary… The lasting impressions each of them has made on society beautifully amplify the heartbeat of queer trans life.—Kirkus Reviews, *STARRED REVEW*

Word Up is partnering with The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, commonly called The Center, a nonprofit organization serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender population of New York City and nearby communities. Donated copies of SO MANY STARS will be distributed to students in The Center’s READY program, which gives workplace training and experience to 45 high schoolers around New York.* Their job placement sites are all vetted to ensure a safe and nurturing queer-friendly environment for their first step into the workforce. Some of these sites include: Word Up Community Bookstore, BRUJAS skate company, Bronx Botanical Gardens, Broadway for the Arts, Animal Care Centers of New York, Brooklyn Public Library, and Generation Q in Queens. Some of READY’s goals are to offer support throughout each learning curve of a youth’s first job, budgeting throughout their first paychecks, advocating for themselves as employees, and being able to enter their next internship/job/or college as seamlessly as possible. Most of all, the purpose of READY is to build confidence in the youth participating in the internship who are entering young adulthood.

*Donated copies of SO MANY STARS can be purchased on WordUpBooks.com (comment “donation”) or through our ticketing platform WithFriends.co/WordUp.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world. This singular project collects the testimonies of twenty elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations—who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very trailblazers.

De Robertis creates a collective coming-of-age story based on hundreds of hours of interviews, offering rare snapshots of ordinary life: kids growing up, navigating family issues and finding community, coming out and changing how they identify over the years, building movements and weathering the AIDS crisis, and sharing wisdom for future generations. Often narrating experiences that took place before they had the array of language that exists today to self-identify beyond the gender binary, this generation lived through remarkable changes in American culture, shaped American culture, and yet rarely takes center stage in the history books. Their stories feel particularly urgent in the current political moment, but also remind readers that their experiences are not new, and that young trans and nonbinary people today belong to a long lineage.

The anecdotes in these pages are riveting, joyful, heartbreaking, full of personality and wisdom, and artfully woven together into one immersive narrative. In De Robertis’s words, So Many Stars shares “behind-the-scenes tales of what it meant—and still means—to create an authentic life, against the odds.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of six novels, including The Palace of Eros, Cantoras, and more. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous honors, including two Stonewall Book Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary writer to receive. De Robertis is also an award-winning literary translator and a professor at San Francisco State University. They live in Oakland, California with their two children.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, where she is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and Kimbilio for Black Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, will be published by Random House in April, 2025, and Both/And, her anthology celebrating trans writers of color, will be published in August by HarperOne.

Word Up Recirculation: Flare Fighters Fest Writing Workshop with Bridgett M. Davis

Thursday, May 29, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York, NY 10032

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In recognition of Lupus Awareness Month, Flare Fighters Fest presents a book reading and writing workshop with author and filmmaker Bridgett M. Davis. Her newly released book, Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy, is a tribute to her sister Rita, whose life was cut short by lupus when she was forty-four. Love, Rita chronicles Bridgett and Rita’s bond and sisterhood while exploring the persistent effects of racism in the lives of Black women. The author will read excerpts from her book and lead attendees in a reflective writing workshop.

Bridgett M. Davis (pronounced Brih-jet) is the author of the memoir, Love, Rita, published by Harper Books in spring 2025. Her first memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Best Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, NBC News and Parade Magazine, and featured as a clue on the quiz show Jeopardy! The upcoming film adaptation will be produced by Plan B Entertainment and released by Searchlight Pictures. She is the author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow, named a Best Book of 2014 by The San Francisco Chronicle, and Shifting Through Neutral, shortlisted for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award. Davis is Professor Emerita in the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she taught creative, narrative and film writing. Her essays have appeared most recently in The New York Times,  the LA Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia Journalism School, she lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Flare Fighters Fest (dba Flare Fighters) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization at the intersection of arts and creative expression, holistic wellness and movement, and community. Founded in 2024, Flare Fighters is proudly based in the heart of New York City, Harlem. Our signature event, Flare Fighters Fest, is held annually in New York City each fall, bringing together individuals, artists, and advocates for a weekend of education, movement, curated networking, and community-building—all while celebrating the healing power of the arts. Follow us @flarefightersfest for more information about Flare Fighters Fest 2025 and other upcoming events.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

Word Up at Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center: Alejandro Heredia’s LOCA with Elizabeth Acevedo

Thursday, March 6, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center
530 W 166th St
New York, NY 10032

 

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Word Up Community Bookshop and Dominican Writers Association invite you to celebrate the debut release of Loca by Alejandro Heredia. In conversation with Heredia will be award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo. There will be a limited signing after the event.

“In a novel that is as tender as it is brilliant, Heredia writes with ferocity and warmth.”—Elizabeth Acevedo

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket.

Alianza Dominican Cultural Center is located at 530 West 166th Street New York, NY 10032. The event will take place on the second floor, which is accessible by an elevator.

ABOUT THE BOOK

If Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown and Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose produced offspring, Alejandro Heredia’s Loca would be their firstborn.

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Loca is his debut novel.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Elizabeth Acevedo is the current Young People’s Poet Laureate and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her loves.