What We Didn't Expect: From Panel to Party

Join for short readings, a panel, and gratis wine/snacks/chatting/book signing from 7 to 8:30pm at Lofty Pigeon Books in Brooklyn, with after-party at Hinterlands next door (cash bar). Moderated by Meg Lemke of MUTHA and M. M. De Voe of Pen Parentis.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2025 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT

Ariel Gore is the LAMBDA Award Winning editor and author of 13 books of fiction and non-fiction including We Were Witches, The End of Eve, F*ck Happiness, Hexing the Patriarchy, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, The Wayward Writer, and Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer. Her work has been nominated for the Oregon Book Award and won a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, a Rainbow Award, and an American Alternative Press Award. She's the founding editor of Hip Mama.

Domenica Ruta is the NYTimes bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You and the novel Last Day, a 2019 NYT Notable book of the year, as well as co-editor of the anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart and Humor. She's published short fiction and essays in the Iowa Review, the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, The Cut, People, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized a handful of times, most notably in Wanting. Her latest novel, All the Mothers, is on sale now everywhere books are sold.

Rachel Deutsch is a writer and cartoonist. Her first graphic memoir, The Mother, was published by Douglas and McIntyre in 2025. Her writings and illustrated pieces have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Prism International, The Pinch, and Mutha Magazine. In 2023, she was nominated for a Pushcart for her short fiction piece, Another Place. She lives in Montreal with her partner and two small children.

Meg Lemke is the comics and graphic novels reviews at Publishers Weekly and Editor-in-Chief of MUTHA Magazine. She’s acted as series editor for the Illustrated PEN series (PEN America) and curated programs at PEN World Voices Festival, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and for the French Comics Association. Her writing has appeared in MUTHA, Publishers Weekly, The Paris Review, Seattle Review, The Atlanta Review, and Seleni, among other places. Find her @meglemke. She lives in Brooklyn.

M. M. De Voe is an internationally published fictionista. Columbia University Writing Fellow, MFA. Five Pushcart nominations, two Editor’s Prizes, a Shirley Jackson Award, a Hugo nomination, and two children later, De Voe founded Pen Parentis.

Collected wisdoms from first 10 years of running Pen Parentis in Book & Baby (first prize at the 2021 NextGen Indie Awards in the category of writing guides). Debut fiction: A Flash of Darkness: Collected Stories of M. M. De Voe (Borda Books, 2023), was called “masterfully conceived” by Kirkus Reviews. An inaugural member of the Lithuanian Writers of the Diaspora Forum, M lives in New York City.

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