Book Signing & Talk with Jamie Lyn Smith & Kate Norris at Visible Voice

2258 Professor Avenue,Cleveland OH 44113

30 April, 2022

Description

Norris and Smith will be reading from their books with a Q&A, book signing, and general merriment to follow. Northeast Ohio Authors Kate Norris and Jamie Lyn Smith pair up for author reading and book signing at Visible Voice Books April 8, 2022— Visible Voice Books hosts Ohio authors Kate Norris and Jamie Lyn Smith on Saturday, April 30th at 7:00 pm. Norris and Smith met as graduate students in the Creative Writing MFA program at Ohio State University, where they struck up a collaboration that lasted well beyond earning their degrees. Moderator Barbara Kakiris, lifelong Clevelander and Lakewood native, will moderate a discussion of the authors’ debut publications— Norris’ novel, and Smith’s short-story collection— as well as their lively friendship, writing processes, and unabashed adoration of dogs. Norris and Smith will be reading from their books with a Q&A, book signing, and general merriment to follow. Refreshments, including wine and beer, will be available for purchase from Visible Voice’s cash bar. Norris’s debut, When You and I Collide, is a young adult sci-fi historical novel about a sixteen-year-old aspiring physicist who witnesses a tragedy and finds herself pulled into an alternate universe—one that already has another version of her in it. This coming-of-age novel, set in New York City during WWII, explores grief and mourning with a backdrop of the quantum revolution. Kirkus Reviews calls When You and I Collide “A serious tale of attempting reinvention at the cost of rending reality,” and Booklist describes it as an “ intriguing, thought-provoking debut.” Township, Jamie Lyn Smith’s debut short story collection, explores a region and the rotating cast of characters who call it home. With honesty, humor, and empathy, Smith closely examines the strains that intimate family ties put on lives worn raw by collective history. Ultimately, the nine stories in Township interrogate the notion of reconciliation, examining whether people can truly change and if forgiveness is possible. David Lynn (Children of God, Editor Emeritus of the Kenyon Review) describes Township’s stories as “Supple, deeply rooted in place, and astonishing in their bite and wit…” and Pulitzer-Prize nominee Lee Martin (The Bright Forever, Gone the Hard Road, Yours, Jean) lauds Township’s”... clear-eyed portrayals of lives lived on the edge-- lives that are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes a little bit of both, but always glorious in the very human tale they have to tell.” Kate Norris received her MFA from Ohio State University, where she taught creative writing and served as fiction editor of The Journal. Her work has appeared in One Teen Story, The Threepenny Review, Sycamore Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others. She currently lives and writes in Cleveland, Ohio with her partner and their mini-menagerie of dogs. Jamie Lyn Smith is an alumna of Kenyon College, Fordham University, and Ohio State. She serves as Fiction Editor at BreakBread Magazine and as a Consulting Editor for the Kenyon Review. She is currently finishing up Hometown, a novel about millennial crises, culture wars and the rise of white nationalism in the rural Midwest, for which she received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. When You and I Collide and Township are available for purchase at Visible Voice Books, 2258 Professor Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44113. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit www.visiblevoicebooks.com or call (216) 961-0084. For more about the authors, see their websites: https://www.katenorriswrites.com and http://jamielyn-smith.squarespace.com/. #