In-Store: 15 Years of The Common w/ Emily Everett, Ananda Lima, and more!

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are encouraged to wear face masks at all times.
• RSVP is highly encouraged but not required.
• Additional copies of the panelists' books will be available for purchase at the event.
• The event will be livestreamed for free on Youtube live: https://youtube.com/live/SUdmi44mNrE
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

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This year Amherst College-based, Whiting Award-winning literary magazine turns 15!

Founded by novelist Jennifer Acker in 2011 with the mission to deepen readers’ individual and collective sense of place, The Common has published 1,530 authors writing from and about 126 countries, in 28 languages. Contributors include household names like Lauren Groff, Susan Choi, and Claire Messud, as well as debut writers who got their start in the magazine, like Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, whose story “The Good Donkey” became part of her debut collection What We Fed to the Manticore, and Ben Shattuck, whose story “The History of Sound” won a Pushcart Prize, became the titular story in his debut collection from Viking Books, and is currently being made into a major film starring Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal.

Emily Everett is an editor and writer from western Massachusetts. Her short fiction appears in The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Everett grew up on a small family dairy farm, studied English and music at Smith College, and studied abroad for a year at University College London. After graduating, she returned to London to do an M.A. in literature at Queen Mary University of London. She lived and worked in the UK from 2009 to 2013. Everett has been managing editor of The Common, a literary magazine based at Amherst College, since 2016. At The Common, she edits fiction, manages print and online production, and hosts the magazine’s podcast. All That Life Can Afford is her debut novel.

Ananda Lima is the author of (Tor, 2024) and (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator and Core Faculty at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers University, Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Lima is also a translator and a photographer. Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago and New York.

Annell López is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for best debut short story collection. Named a best short story collection of 2024 by Electric Literature, I’ll Give You a Reason has been longlisted for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Reforma Latinx Book Award, and the Clark Fiction Prize. López was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Workshops. Her work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Refinery29, and TIME. López received her MFA from the University of New Orleans, where she was awarded the Joanna Leake Fiction Prize. She is working on a novel.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel, Glassworks, was was longlisted for the Center for Fiction and VCU Cabell First Novel Prizes and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Apple, and Good Housekeeping. Her second novel, Mutual Interest, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2025. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner.

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