Trauma, racial injustice, rape culture, family relationships, body image: we all carry these weights around with us in our own way. How can we examine and write about them without crumbling under their weight? Join TJ Butler, Rebecca Morrison, and Tara Campbell for a discussion of working productively with tough material: how to start, how to dig, and how to recognize and respect your limits.
TJ Butler is an author and photographer who lives part-time on a sailboat on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. She writes essays and fiction that are not all fun and games, and her black-and-white photography mimics the gritty, hardscrabble themes in her writing. Her work has been featured in outlets such as Huffington Post, Insider and various literary journals. She enjoys coaching writers; rather than being a writing coach, she's more like a writer's therapist. BUST Magazine calls her new short story collection, Dating Silky Maxwell, "gritty, realistic, often unnerving, and far from glamorous." Learn more at TJButlerAuthor.com
Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University's MFA in Creative Writing. She teaches creative writing at venues such as American University, Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer's Center, Hugo House, and the National Gallery of Art. Publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, and The Rumpus. She's the author of a novel, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in fall 2024. Find her at www.taracampbell.com
Rebecca Morrison is a lawyer, writer and painter. She writes about belonging, identity, and worth as a woman, an immigrant and an American. Her work has been in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Today Show, Newsweek, NBC News, HuffPost, Salon, Insider and The Independent. Her HuffPost essay was the #1 Trending Story on Apple News and taught in composition classes at Marymount University. She lives in the Washington D.C. area. You can find her at www.rebeccakmorrison.com.
Annie Bloom's Books is excited to be the independent, long-distance neighborhood bookstore partnering with Brown Bag Lit for this event. Annie Bloom's has been a proud indie since 1978 and can ship anywhere in the United States from their store in Portland, Oregon. You can follow this link to their website and order a book to support these fabulous writers.