IN-PERSON | A Cross-Genre Evening w. Sejal Shah, Usman Hameedi, & Daniel Brock Johnson

In person at Brookline Booksmith! Join us as writers Usman Hameedi, Daniel Brock Johnson, and Sejal Shah discuss their work across genre.

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RSVP to let us know you’re coming! Depending on the volume of responses, an RSVP may be required for entrance to the event. You will also be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates. In the event that we reach capacity and have to close RSVPs, there will not be a waiting list.

How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions

From the author of This Is One Way to Dance, linked genre-queer short stories braided with images and ephemera explore the experiences of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman searching for home.

In the eleven linked short stories of How to Make Your Mother Cry, Sejal Shah builds a shrine gleaming with memory and myth. Keys, rocks, photographs, fairy tales, fables, and relics all add texture and meaning to an exploration of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman in a culture that excuses the behavior of men. Throughout, girls and women contend with the expectations, limitations, and challenges of becoming the heroine of one’s own life.

How to Make Your Mother Cry—Shah’s follow-up to her award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance—continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. By braiding stories and images with fictional letters to a beloved English teacher, the collection defies traditional autofiction, epistolary, and short story conventions. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.

Sejal Shah is the author of the debut short story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions, published by West Virginia University Press. She is also the author of This Is One Way to Dance: Essays, (University of Georgia Press), which was named an NPR Best Book of 2020 and recommended in the New York Times.

Staying Right Here

Usman Hameedi’s debut collection, Staying Right Here, is a journey in finding home. Hameedi invites readers to bear witness to vignettes of joy and hardship as he navigates finding his place in America.

From an ode to Bodegas, an autobiography of his eyebrows, and elegies for lost friends, Hameedi’s thematic metaphors for family, wellness, and American biases weave a literary tapestry.

Reading Usman’s work is like drinking a warm chai while watching the sunset in Brooklyn, or coming home to an aromatic Biryani. In his first poetry collection, Hameedi writes with an unmistakably unique voice that is not afraid of who he is.

Staying Right Here is for those who have looked for themselves in media and only seen a one-dimensional character staring back at them.

Usman Hameedi is a Pakistani American scientist, poet, and Mass Poetry’s Board Chair. His debut collection, Staying Right Here, was published by Button Poetry and his work has also appeared in the Worcester Review and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Shadow ACT: An Elegy for Journalist James Foley

Longlisted for the 2024 Mass Book Award

Proceeds from the sale of Shadow Act will benefit the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, advocating for the freedom of all Americans held hostage abroad and promoting the safety of journalists worldwide.

In his second collection—a powerful act of documentary poetics a decade in the making—Johnson chronicles the perils and joys of fatherhood and a shattering tragedy that plays out thousands of miles away. Nearly two years after the poet’s closest friend went missing, journalist James Foley was executed by ISIS in Syria. In this poetic daybook like no other, Johnson often speaks directly to his missing friend—”I don’t know, Jim, where you are,” even long after his death. Page to page, Foley ghosts in and out of the book, as the poet hails the birth of children, recounts hunting for the body of a neighbor’s missing cat, and, later, pores over the hand-written pages that Foley smuggled out of a Libyan prison in his shoe. An educator and poet, Johnson has crafted a vibrant, urgent collection that pulses with the terror and hardship Foley faced, the anguish of those he left behind, and the everlasting friendship between the two men. During a time of great collective trauma and mourning, this heartfelt, formally rich collection tackles the question: “How do you go on living, loving, and creating in the face of unthinkable loss?”

Daniel Brock Johnson is the author of Shadow Act: an Elegy for Journalist James Foley, published by McSweeney’s and long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award. Johnson is also the author of How to Catch a Falling Knife with Alice James Books.