An Evening with Jesse Lee Kercheval & Mary Lynn Reed

This is an in person event at A Room of One’s Own.

About the books

In Mary Lynn Reed’s debut short story collection, Phantom Advances, young queer women travel America’s back roads, roaming through the South, Midwest, New York, and California, while questions of gender and identity ride shotgun. Peering through bug-stained windshields and the viewfinders of old film cameras, these wanderers find love, heartbreak, and little pieces of themselves wherever the road takes them. Along the way, their origin stories are also revealed. Boyish girls ace math while mucking horse stalls at a nudist summer camp and teenage tomboys pool-shark at the family-owned Game Room. In bowling alleys, factories, college-town bars, and gay discos, the stories in Phantom Advances calculate the risks of love, and contemplate the odds of being seen for who you truly are.

In Space, Jesse Lee Kercheval opens her story in Cocoa, Florida, in 1966 as a precocious ten-year-old whose family—father, mother, two little girls—is trying to ride the Space Race’s tide of optimism. But even as the rockets keep going up, the Kercheval family slowly spirals down.

Mary Lynn Reed is a fiction writer and mathematician. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland and a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Illinois. Her fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Colorado Review, South Dakota Review, Potomac Review, Mississippi Review, Free State Review, and many other places. Mary Lynn’s fiction has been honored with the University of Maryland’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and the Per Contra Prize for Short Fiction. Mary Lynn grew up in and around Tampa, Florida. She currently lives in western New York with her wife, the artist Lesley C. Weston, and together they co-edit the journal MoonPark Review. Mary Lynn is also a professor of mathematics at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and translator. She was born in Fontainbleau, France, and raised in Washington, D.C., and Cocoa, Florida. She studied writing at Florida State University and graduated with an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. After a year’s teaching at DePauw in Indiana, she moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to teach creative writing at the university. She currently divides her time between Madison and Montevideo, Uruguay.