Join us for an evening with writers

Chris Vanjonack & Weston Morrow

to discuss their debut collections

Out of Body & Cloud Builder

in conversation with Lindsay Bernal

to be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE

Tickets are available here!

Join us for an evening of conversation, poems, and stories from three wonderful writers: Chris Vanjonack, Weston Morrow, and Lindsay Bernal.

OUT OF BODY by Chris Vanjonack:

A wildly inventive collection of interconnected speculative stories—spanning the multiverse, demonic attachment, and life after death—from an electrifying new voice in fiction. Throughout this apocalyptic collection, an aimless ghost haunts his ex-girlfriend for evidence that she’s actually upset about his death, three friends discover a device that purports to predict the best day of its users’ lives, and a drunken posse descends into the woods in search of the clowns that have been terrorizing their small town. Morbidly funny and brilliantly observed, Out of Body is an atmospheric, dead original feast for the senses.

"Chris Vanjonack is a freight train of talent, and he's at full-throttle in Out of Body. This is a mind-bending, world-splitting, wildly entertaining debut--a significant event on the landscape of contemporary fiction."

— Patrick Ryan, New York Times bestselling author of Buckeye

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CLOUD BUILDER by Weston Morrow:

What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which National Poetry Series winner Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington State, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past. These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living.

“A tender, achingly pensive debut; a feat of a collection…”

—Ariana Benson, author of Black Pastoral, winner of the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

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WHAT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO DO WITH by Lindsay Bernal

Lindsay Bernal's What It Doesn't Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems. Through quick turns and juxtapositions, Lindsay Bernal navigates the paradoxical states of grief and love, alternating between vulnerability and irony, despair and humor. Her wry, contemporary voice confronts serious subjects with unpredictable wit.

“These poems question what we take for granted about language and the ways our own words can bind us: 'Darkness doesn't descend suddenly at all.'”

—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Denver, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in One Story, The Book of the Month Club's Volume 0, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Out of Body is his first book.

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Weston Morrow is the author of the poetry collection Cloud Builder (University of Georgia Press, Sept. 1, 2026), winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series. His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in English Literature from Central Washington University. He grew up in and around Tacoma, Washington. A former print journalist, he teaches writing at The Ohio State University.

Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn't Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), winner of the National Poetry Series. Her recent poems appear in Chicago Review, the Georgia Review, the Hopkins Review, New England Review, Oversound, Poem-a-Day, and other journals. She coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where she also directs the Writers Here & Now reading series and teaches undergraduate poetry workshops and courses on poetics.