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FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. More information about this month’s installment forthcoming.

FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.

Seating will be open beginning at 7pm. The event will start at 7:30pm.

Literati is pleased to welcome Alexander Maksik in support of his most recent novel, Shelter in Place. Alexander will be joined in conversation by Natalie Bakopoulos, author of The Green Shore.

Set in the Pacific Northwest in the jittery, jacked-up early 1990s, Shelter in Place, by one of America’s most thrillingly defiant contemporary authors, is a stylish literary novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family, and the dramatic consequences of love.

Joseph March, a twenty-one-year-old working class kid from Seattle, has just graduated from college and his future beckons, unencumbered, limitless, magnificent. Joe’s life implodes when he starts to suffer the symptoms of bipolar disorder, and, not long after, his mother, Anne-Marie March, beats a stranger to death with a hammer.

Joe moves to White Pine, Washington, where Anne-Marie is serving time and his father has set up house. He is followed by Tess Wolff, a fiercely independent woman with whom he is in love. Meanwhile, Joe’s mother is gradually being transformed into a national heroine. Many see her crime as a furious, exasperated act of righteous rebellion. Tess, too, is under her spell. Spurred on by Anne-Marie’s example, she enlists Joe in a secret, violent plan that will forever change their lives.

Maksik sings of modern America’s battered soul and of the lacerating emotions that make us human. Magnetic and masterfully told, Shelter in Place is about the things we are willing to die for, and those we’re willing to kill for.

Alexander Maksik is the author of three novels: You Deserve Nothing; A Marker to Measure Drift, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for both the William Saroyan Prize and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; and the forthcoming Shelter in Place, due out in September. A contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler, his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper’s, Tin House, Harvard Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon and Narrative Magazine, among other publications. Maksik is the recipient of a 2015 Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and The Corporation of Yaddo. He is the co-artistic director of the Can Cab Literary Residence in Catalonia, Spain and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Literati is thrilled to welcome Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jaimy Gordon, and Andy Mozina to read from their most recent work.

Bonnie Jo Campbell teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the author of Once Upon a River, American Salvage (a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award), Q Road, Women and Other Animals, and, most recently, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters.

Jaimy Gordon lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the author ofBogeywoman, She Drove Without Stopping, the novella Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue, and the fantasy classic novel Shamp of the City-Solo. Her fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the National Book Award. Gordon teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Andy Mozina is a professor of English at Kalamazoo College and the author of the novel Contrary Motion, short story collections The Women Were Leaving the Men, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and Quality Snacks, which was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. His fiction has also appeared in numerous magazines, including Tin House and McSweeney’s.