Peach Mag Presents: CHELSEA HODSON

with Frankie Barnet, Janet McNally, Matthew Bookin, and art by Julie Molloy

Thursday, June 21st / doors 7, readings 7:30 / Just Buffalo Literary Center / free / Facebook

Peach Mag is proud to present visiting writers Chelsea Hodson and Frankie Barnet alongside local talent Janet McNally, Matthew Bookin, and Julie Molloy for a reading on Thursday, June 21st, at Just Buffalo. The event is Peach Mag’s summer installment of its Episodes Reading Series, and is free and open to the public.

Chelsea Hodson, whose work poet Maggie Nelson has called “bracingly good… refreshing and welcome,” is touring for the recent release of her highly anticipated essay collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else. Hodson shook the national literary scene when her chapbook, Pity the Animal, was published in 2014; in it, she explores human submission, sugar daddies, and the commodification of the body with tender insight and unforgettable prose. Hodson expands on these themes and more in her debut collection, which has been lauded by the likes of Miranda July, Amy Hempel, Sarah Manguso, and Scott McClanahan, and critically acclaimed nationwide.

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. In these essays, she asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.

Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre--including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission--Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship. Both tender and jarring, this collection is relevant to anyone who’s ever searched for what the self is worth. --Henry Holt

Tonight I’m Someone Else will be on sale at the event from Talking Leaves...Books.

Accompanying Hodson is Montréal-bred fiction writer Frankie Barnet, author of An Indoor Kind of Girl (Metatron, 2016) and MFA candidate at Syracuse University. Representing the local literary scene are Janet McNally, young adult fiction writer and winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her collection, Some Girls, and Peach Mag’s own Matthew Bookin, who is celebrating the recent release of his debut novella, Honest Days (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Peach will also be featuring the artwork of Julie Molloy, a local artist, Peach Mag contributor, and designer at Block Club.

Peach Mag is a not-for-profit literary magazine that publishes a new creative writing or visual art feature every Tuesday and Friday at its flagship publication, peachmgzn.com. Peach also produces in-print anthologies, hosts a seasonal reading series, presents workshops and writing prizes, and offers reading recommendations in its weekly column, “Peach Picks,” in The Public.