Friday, January 17 at 6:00 PM
On the occasion of the paperback release of Annie Liontas's memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery, join us for an special evening of reading and conversation with a panel of Philly authors discussing how they tell the stories they don't want you to tell. Annie will be joined by Emma Copley Eisenberg, Hasanthika Sirisena and Piyali Bhattacharya.
Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of Let Me Explain You and the memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery, which was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. They co-edited the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors, and their work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, BOMB, Lithub, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Oprah Daily, and elsewhere. They helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. Annie co-hosts the literary podcast LitFriends and lives in Philadelphia with their wife, dog, and Email the rabbit.
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the nationally bestselling debut novel Housemates (Hogarth 2024) as well as the narrative nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020), which was named a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Granta, Esquire, The New Republic, Time Magazine, Lux Magazine, McSweeney’s, VQR, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Her short story collection, Fat Swim, is forthcoming from Hogarth in 2026.
Hasanthika Sirisena's work has appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Michigan Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review Online, and other magazines; anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017) and in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018); and named notable by Best American Short Stories in 2011 and 2012 and Best American Essays in 2022. They have received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and am a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. Hasanthika is currently faculty at the MFA Program in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. Their short story collection The Other One was the winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction and was released in 2016. Their essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books, 2021) won the 2020 Gournay Prize and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award.
Piyali Bhattacharya is a writer, editor, and professor of Creative Writing. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Literary Hub, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic and elsewhere. She is the editor of the anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, 2016), which won the Independent Publisher Book Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Piyali holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, an M.A. from SOAS—University of London, and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where she was winner of the Peter Straub Award for Fiction. Her writing interests range from food and the politics that surround it, to immigration, healthcare, women’s voices, and textiles. She is currently at work on her first novel, which has been supported by fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and ARGS. Piyali is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has received the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring in Creative Writing.
This is a free event.
