Join us for a reading in celebration of Mathieu Cailler’s new short story collection Forest for the Trees & Other Stories, winner of the 2023 Paris Book Festival. Poet & Memoirist Shonda Buchanan, and fiction author Laura Warrell will be reading new and selected work.

In Forest for the Trees & Other Stories, Mathieu Cailler delivers a diverse collection of fifteen shorts that perfectly captures characters steeped in their own troubles. With clear and pointed prose, Cailler creates a conduit through which readers experience the characters’ sufferings, losses, revelations, their moments of connection, and their snippets of happiness. The author’s experimentation with voice and point of view makes this collection honest and accessible, allowing readers to feel true compassion by better understanding others and the imperfect world we all inhabit.

“Using bright prose and a heartfelt, empathetic eye, Mathieu Cailler enters the shadows of everyday relationships to reveal the desperate love and clinging lies that his complex characters offer each other to survive. Forest for the Trees is a story collection for a time in which so many souls hunger for connection. A tremendous read.”

—Sophfronia Scott, author of Wild, Beautiful, and Free and The Seeker and the Monk

Doors Open: 6:30 PM. Readings: 7:00 PM

About the authors

Mathieu Cailler is the author of seven books: one novel, two short story collections, two volumes of poetry, and two children’s titles. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, including the Saturday Evening Post and the Los Angeles Times. He is the recipient of numerous awards, most notably the Shakespeare Award, the Short Story America Prize, the New England Book Festival Award, the Los Angeles Book Festival Prize, and the Paris Book Festival Prize. Feel free to connect with him on social media @writesfromla or at mathieucailler.com.

Laura Warrell is the author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Golden Poppy Book Award through the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Apple Books, The Root, The Millions, Hollywood Reporter, Bustle, Today, Debutiful, and elsewhere, the novel was also chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick. Laura’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Writer, and other publications.

Shonda Buchanan is the author of five books, including the award-winning memoir, Black Indian. Shonda is also a faculty member in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. An award-winning poet, fiction, nonfiction writer, and educator, Shonda is the recipient of the Brody Arts Fellowship from the California Community Foundation, a Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grants, the Denise L. Scott and Frank Sullivan Awards, and an Eloise Klein-Healy Scholarship. Consulting Curator Poet for The Broad Art Museum, Shonda is also a Sundance Institute Writing Arts fellow, a PEN Center Emerging Voices fellow and a Jentel Artist Residency fellow. Finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review poetry contest, Shonda’s memoir, Black Indian, won the 2020 Indie New Generation Book Award and was chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read” to learn about institutional racism. About to enter a 3rd printing, Black Indian begins the saga of her family’s migration stories of Free People of Color communities exploring identity, ethnicity, landscape, and loss. Her first collection of poetry, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, was nominated for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Library of Virginia Book Awards.

Masks are encouraged while inside our center.

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Please arrive early.