Dora Malech: Trying X Trying and Elise Levine: Big of You, with Nate Brown

Join us at Bird in Hand for a special joint book launch for Dora Malech's new poetry collection, Trying X Trying, and Elise Levine's new short story collection, Big of You!

We'll have the pleasure of hearing from both writers in conversation with Nate Brown, and lingering with the ways these collections overlap and diverge thematically-- as well as with what poetry and fiction have to teach one another. Both of these collections are interested in turning over familiar phrases and concepts to find the strangeness and freshness underneath. In Big of You, people of all ages (even a millenia!) sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves. In Trying × Trying, Dora Malech dissects the language of our times; she turns over the familiar phrases of politics, parenthood, and pandemic to reveal what lies beneath.

We're looking forward to seeing you for this celebratory night!

Order TRYING X TRYING here!

Order BIG OF YOU here!

Dora Malech’s most recent book of poetry is Flourish, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, which will publish her next book of poetry, Trying × Trying, in 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry, and her honors include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an associate professor in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.

Elise Levine’s newest book is the story collection Big of You. She is also the author of Say This: Two Novellas, the novels Blue Field and Requests and Dedications, and the story collections This Wicked Tongue and Driving Men Mad. Her work has also appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, and Blackbird, and has been included five times in Best Canadian Stories. Her awards include ones from the Canada Council for the Arts, Yaddo, Ucross, and MacDowell. She lives in Baltimore where she teaches in the MA in writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

Nate Brown’s stories have appeared in One Story, the Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Five Chapters, Carolina Quarterly and elsewhere, and his essays, reviews, and features have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, Electric Literature, Publisher’s Weekly, LitHub, and other publications. He is editor-at-large of the award-winning literary journal American Short Fiction in Austin, TX, and has received fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Vermont Studio Center, the Ucross Foundation, and multiple work-study scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has taught creative writing and composition at the University of Wisconsin, through the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, at the George Washington University, Georgetown University, and elsewhere. Currently, he is a senior lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University and is the 2024-25 Engaged Faculty Scholar of the Practice at JHU’s Center for Social Concern.

He lives in the greatest city in America, Baltimore, MD.

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