We provide a supportive space for writers at all levels to cultivate creativity, accountability, and community through shared storytelling.
Meetup Location: BlackL!ne Social
The Margin Scribes: A QTBIPOC Writers Collective is a space for queer and trans writers of color to come together for creativity, accountability, and community.
Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting out, this is a place to share, learn, and grow in a supportive environment.
Author Eileen Elizabeth presents her new book in conversation with Reza Aslan.
Join us for a conversation with Eileen Elizabeth, author of Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying World, and acclaimed author and scholar Reza Aslan!
Blending memoir, cultural criticism, environmental writing, and spiritual inquiry, the book explores how ritual and creative practice can help us navigate grief, ecological change, and the search for meaning in an uncertain world. Eileen and Reza will discuss grief, transformation, the sacred dimensions of the natural world, and the role storytelling can play in helping us care for one another and the places we inhabit.
The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.
About the participants:
Eileen Elizabeth is a poet and essayist. She cofounded Boshemia magazine and has written for a variety of publications, including Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Bellevue Literary Review, Appalachian Review, and Pangyrus.
Reza Aslan is an internationally acclaimed writer, producer, and scholar of religions. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
About the book:
Carrying the Bones braids memoir, cultural criticism, and poetics to ask how we might mourn meaningfully in an era of environmental crisis and pandemic loss. Moving between the personal and the planetary, the book traverses landscapes from Appalachian forests and West Coast cemeteries to Arctic tundra and Sámi song traditions, drawing on ancient Greek lyric, Indigenous cosmologies, and contemporary ecological thought. Each of the four sections serves as a ritual space: an act of carrying the dead, tending their memories, and imagining futures beyond despair. Through fieldwork, historical research, and intimate narrative from a queer perspective, author Eileen Elizabeth explores how grief can be more than private sorrow—it can become an artistic, communal, and ecological practice.
By providing narrative and ritual prompts at a moment when traditional funerary customs have been disrupted and many people lack scripts for grief, Carrying the Bones empowers individuals—especially those who identify as secular or spiritually unaffiliated—to craft new rites of remembrance. It offers a luminous contribution to ongoing conversations about how art, language, and ritual can help us face mortality and care for a dying world.
7 amazing women authors each reading from their new books. Meet the authors, buy books, celebrate community!
The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives is pleased to present its inaugural Mazer Book Launch Salon featuring new books published by lesbian and queer women authors.
Curated and hosted by Simone Wallace, Co-Founder/Co-Owner of Sisterhood Bookstore (1972-1998), the event will feature seven women whose recent work spans fiction, poetry, memoir, young-adult literature, outdoor adventure, and feminist cultural criticism.
Presented in the spirit of Sisterhood Bookstore and Simone’s lifelong pursuit of connecting writers with readers, the event honors the enduring role lesbian and feminist bookstores have played as places of discovery, dialogue, visibility, and community. Attendees will enjoy a short reading from each author and have an opportunity to meet the writers and purchase books.
Participating authors include Nancy Beverly, author of Journeys Outside & Within: Hiking Adventures & Lessons Learned; Lisa Freeman, author of Snow People; Elizabeth Hale, author of Every Almost; Regina F. Lark, author of Emotional Labor, 2nd Edition; Kris Madigan, author of The Wine-Dark Sea; Jen O’Connor, author of Uncertain Times: Poems on Identity, Love, Loss, & Hope; and Sophia Surti, author of asymmetrical ponderings.
Join us to celebrate, support, and even be inspired to get that book of yours out of your notebook and ready for publication.
Join Rep Club for a discussion on ‘Stellar Smoke’ by author Tanaïs & moderator Chantal Aida Gordon
WHO & WHAT: Join Rep Club for a discussion on ‘Stellar Smoke’ by author Tanaïs, in conversation with Chantal Aida Gordon.
A hypnotically original and lush speculative novel from award-winning author Tanaïs about family secrets and the mother–daughter bond across generations—ultimately blurring the boundary between past and present, human and machine.
WHEN: Doors at 6:30pm, event promptly at 7pm.
WHERE: Reparations Club, 3054 S. Victoria Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90016
HOW:
TICKET w/ BOOK: This ticket guarantees a seat including a signed book available for pick up at the event.
FREE RSVP (No Book Included): This Free RSVP DOES NOT include a copy of the book and entry is based strictly on capacity at the door. Books may be available for purchase in-store.
SIGNED BOOK ONLY: Can’t make it IRL but still want a signed copy? Order directly from our site!
Please email us at questions@reparations.club if you have any additional needs, questions, or accessibility concerns.
About the Book:
Qamar is a musician hustling in a near-future metropolitan city. Struggling to pay rent and heartbroken after a breakup, she decides to return to the island ashram of her childhood. It’s time to finally settle the rift she has with her estranged mother, Veda—a brilliant scientist, actress, and one of the leaders of a now-dissolved cult called the Endless Temple.
But when Qamar arrives, the land is verdant yet neglected, and, most troubling, there are no signs of her mother or sister, Palo. Behind a retina scan–locked door, Qamar encounters her mother’s last opus, a machine consciousness called VEDA (Virtual Experiences, Dreams and Afterlife), designed to reveal the story of Veda’s life. The descent into VEDA’s technoscape forces Qamar to confront the taboos and tragedies of their past, while bracing herself for the wild, unexpected possibilities that await.
Tanaïs (née Tanwi Nandini Islam) is a multidisciplinary artist, novelist, memoirist, and perfumer. They are the author of In Sensorium: Notes for My People, which won the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, and offers an alternative history of South Asia through the lens of scent. Their critically acclaimed queer coming-of-age debut novel, Bright Lines, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They studied at Vassar College and Brooklyn College, and founded the independent artisan perfume house Studio Tanaïs. Their writing and perfumes have been featured in Vogue, Vogue India, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, The Cut, The Nation, and more. They live in New York City with their husband, Mojo.
Chantal Aida Gordon is an award-winning writer and gardener. Her fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction and Vassar Review, and her journalism in T Magazine, Shondaland, Teen Vogue, and others. She’s the co-author of houseplant book How to Window Box, a guide to bringing nature into your home. Born in Brooklyn and raised in the suburbs of DC, she now lives in Northeast Los Angeles.
Four local writers dare to break the rules, raise their voices, and refuse to compromise.
What does a writer sacrifice when they soften their work to fit the mold? And what becomes possible when they refuse?
On Nov. 4, four local writers confront subjects many books shy away from: race, desire, class, the messy moments when life stops making sense. They decline to sand off the rough edges. Their work runs from punk-inflected inter-genre prose to memoir, from poetry to historical fiction, but the nerve is the same: they write without asking permission and without apology. In an evening of reading and discussion, they talk about writing hard truths, the pressure to make difficult material palatable, and what a writer stands to gain by holding the line.
Featuring:
Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer from South Gate, who has a collection of inter-genre prose, ¡PÓNK!, with Nightboat Books.
Joshua Escobar is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter from Southern California’s Inland Empire and author of the Bo Huston Award-winning novel Demons of Eminence.
Novelist Rasheed Newson is the author of the national bestseller My Government Means to Kill Me, which was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022, and the critically-acclaimed There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, which explores Black LGBTQ+ life during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Kaila Yu is a Los Angeles-based author and journalist whose debut memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, was published by Crown, with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times and Condé Nast Traveler.
This event is free to attend, and RSVPs are requested. A Zoom link will be provided to those who RSVP, and the livestream can be watched on the WeHo Arts YouTube channel (youtube.com/wehoarts).
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. The 2026 program is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
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