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Literati is pleased to partner with One Pause Poetry in showcasing the work of Rickey Laurentiis, Gretchen Marquette, Airea Matthews, and Ladan Osman.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and named one of the Top 16 Best Poetry Books by Buzzfeed. The recipient of a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, his other honors include fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy.

Gretchen Marquette is the author of May Day, and has published poems in Harper’s, the Paris Review, and Tin House. She lives and teaches in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Airea D. Matthews is a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and the executive editor of The Offing. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she earned her MFA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poet,The Missouri Review, The Baffler, Callaloo, Indiana Review, WSQ and elsewhere. Her performance work has been featured at the Cannes Lions Festival, PBS’ RoadTrip Nation and NPR.

Ladan Osman is the author of The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony. Her work has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Artful Dodge,Narrative Magazine, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Vinyl Poetry. Her chapbook, Ordinary Heaven, appears in Seven New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook boxed set. She lives in Chicago.

Literati is delighted to host the launch of Chris McCormick’s debut, Desert Boys.

A vivid and assured work of fiction from a major new voice, following the life of a young man growing up, leaving home, and coming back again, marked by the stark beauty of California’s Mojave Desert and the various fates of those who leave and those who stay behind. This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner’s world–the family, friends and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new lief in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school’s confederate mascot; Daley’s mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley’s most meaningful–and most fraught–connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger. A luminous debut, Desert Boys traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.

“This is a book about place, or really like so many books about place (Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio) two places, in this case two Californias―San Francisco on the one hand; the less familiar but finely evoked small desert community from which the narrator originates on the other. But it’s also a book about shame, two shames, the shame of where we come from, and the shame of leaving it. Through a series of quietly intimate confessions we learn how torn the teller is between past and present, small town and big city, and McCormick captures this tension beautifully in the contrast between his laconic, but frankly feeling prose and his restless formal innovation. Wise and vulnerable by turns, this is a quietly stunning debut.”―Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

Chris McCormick was raised in the Antelope Valley. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.