When: Sunday, March 19, 8:00 – 9:00 PM EST aka GMT-5
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
All who RSVP will have their name entered into drawings for books and prizes!
(You must be present at virtual event to win.)
Our Beautiful Reward is Reckoning’s brand-new special issue, edited by Catherine Rockwood, on the theme of bodily autonomy. To celebrate Our Beautiful Reward‘s print release, we’re having a virtual launch party! Join us in March for readings by eight of our brilliant contributors and hear their fierce, furious, compelling, devastating work. The overturn of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. is an acceleration of repressive policies that limit rights to bodily self-determination all over the country. We see this in the deliberate erosion of access to abortion care, and in a recent surge in draconian bans on gender-affirming care for trans Americans. The same playbook is being tested the world over: from Italy to the UK to Afghanistan, authoritarian regimes exert brutal control over human bodies. It’s never been more important to seek out marginalized voices and new ideas on these issues. Join us and get an earful from the likes of luminaries Linda Cooper, Dyani Sabin, Juliana Roth, Julian K. Jarboe, Riley Tao, Marissa Lingen, Leah Bobet, and M.C. Benner-Dixon. We’ll talk a bit about actions we can take and organizations we can support resisting the erosion of the innate human rights to identity and bodily autonomy. Stick around and we’ll draw names and give away copies of Reckoning and Our Beautiful Reward, as well as prizes including Reckoning pins and t-shirts.
Essential Dreams Press and the Storied Imaginarium will co-host the launch and reading. Sign up to find out more and learn about future events here.
All who RSVP will have their name entered into the drawings! (You must be present at virtual event to win.)
Hosts
Julie C. Day
Julie C. Day is currently at work on her mosaic novel Stories of Driesch. Her dark fantasy novella, The Rampant, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is also the author of the genre-bending collection Uncommon Miracles and series editor of the charity anthologies Weird Dream Society and Dreams for a Broken World. Day has had over forty stories published in magazines and journals such as The Dark Magazine, BlackStatic, Podcastle, Interzone, and The Cincinnati Review. With an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and MS in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, all research is now in service of her stories and her rabbit-hole curiosity. You can find Julie online at @thisjulieday or on her blog at stillwingingit.com.
Carina Bissett
Carina Bissett is a writer, poet, and educator working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in multiple journals and anthologies including Upon a Twice Time, Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales, Arterial Bloom, Gorgon: Stories of Emergence, Weird Dream Society, Hath No Fury, andthe HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. V, VI, and VIII. She has also written stories set in shared worlds for RPGs at Green Ronin Publishing and Onyx Path Publishing. In addition to writing, she co-edited Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americaås. Bissett also teaches generative writing workshops at The Storied Imaginarium and works as a volunteer for the Horror Writers Association (HWA). In 2021, she was acknowledged for her volunteer efforts at HWA with the prestigious Silver Hammer Award. Bisset’s work has been nominated for several awards, including the Pushcart Prize and the Sundress Publications Best of the Net. She can be found online at carinabissett.com.
Editor
Catherine Rockwood
Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts with her family. Their poetry appears in or is forthcoming from Moist Poetry Journal, Strange Horizons, Scoundrel Time, Contrary Magazine, Rogue Agent Journal, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Endeavors To Obtain Perpetual Motion, is available from The Ethel Zine press. Another mini-chapbook, And We Are Far From Shore, is forthcoming from Ethel in 2023.
Participants
Juliana Roth
Juliana was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts for her fiction. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Your Magic, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. She writes the weekly newsletter Drawing Animals which features essays, interviews, and doodles celebrating our interconnection with animal life, and teaches writing at NYU.
Julian K. Jarboe
Julian K. Jarboe is the author of the Lambda Award-winning collection Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel.
Leah Bobet
Novelist, editor, and critic Leah Bobet’s novels have won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Aurora Awards, been Ontario Library Association’s Best Bets, and shortlisted for the Andre Norton Award. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple Year’s Best anthologies and is taught in high school and university classrooms in Canada, Australia, and the US, and her poetry appears in both speculative and literary journals. She was a founding editor at Abyss & Apex, editor of Ideomancer Speculative Fiction, and guest poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice’s 2021 issue. She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds civic engagement spaces, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at www.leahbobet.com.
Linda Cooper
Linda Cooper lives in Ronald, Washington and teaches creative writing at Washington Outdoor School. She completed her MFA at Eastern Washington University and her poems have been published in Verse Daily, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, Many Mountains Moving, Willow Springs, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Permafrost, Hubbub, Elixir, Diner, Pontoon, and many more. She also won the 2015 Orlando Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Allied Arts Foundation Prize.
Marissa Lingen
Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer living in the suburbs of Minneapolis with her family. Mostly she writes speculative fiction. She has a large collection of foliage-themed jewelry.
Riley Tao
Riley Tao (they/them) is a Californian college student who has been rejected by eighty-five literary agents while seeking representation for their YA fantasy novel, who turned to writing short stories after deciding that maybe they should walk before they run. They spent six months updating a creative writing blog with short stories on a weekly basis at rileyriles.wordpress.com before deciding to focus on a second novel. They also love computer science and mathematics, and in their free time they play homebrewed RPGs and hug their cat.
Dyani Sabin
Dyani Sabin is an author of speculative fiction, poetry, and science journalism. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Enchanted Conversations, Vastarien, as well as National Geographic, and Popular Science. You can find her haunting a cornfield, chasing ghosts on the endangered species list, or on Twitter @DyaniSabin.
M. C. Benner Dixon
M. C. Benner Dixon lives, writes, and grows things in Pittsburgh, PA. She is quick to make a pun and slow to cut her grass. Her short stories have appeared in Funicular, The Los Angeles Review, The Hopper, Fusion Fragment, and elsewhere. Christine’s writing includes a collection of craft essays, co-authored with Sharon Fagan McDermott, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Her debut novel, The Height of Land, is the recipient of the 2022 Orison Fiction Prize. Christine is the Adult Program Director for Write Pittsburgh. Find her on Twitter @mchristinebd or at bennerdixon.com.
We hope you join us on March 19th! Click below to RSVP to the Launch/Reading, enter the giveaway drawings, and add the event to your calendar!
