Join Blacksburg Books as they host Megan Doney (WFYP, June 2008) and Chanlee Luu, winners of the Washington Writers Publishing House Prize in nonfiction and poetry, respectively. The authors will read from their books as well as talk about the writing process and getting published with a small press.

Megan Doney – Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir

After surviving a school shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia, English professor Megan Doney was traumatized and adrift. Rather than hardening her heart and life, she wrote Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir. An insightful response to American gun violence and illusions of public and private safety, it’s also about her journey over the past decade toward living with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love.

Chanlee Luu – The Machine Autocorrects Code to I

A knock-out debut that erases the boundaries of time and geography with unrestrained wit, The Machine Autocorrects Code to I holds its subjects – family members at odds with their hopes and fears, various fruits and animals constrained by the laws of humans, and an alien seeking beauty in the world – with tenderness and wry knowledge of the fragile systems that hold their world in place. This universe of poems wanders through the messy past, battles in the charged present, and dreams/nightmares to the unknown future. In this experiment in forms, Chanlee Luu is a mad scientist, cracking Asian jokes, shoveling golden sand, and coding her voice to vitality.