ASU Book Group: ‘Visiting Composer’ by Andrea Avery

The ASU Book Group's March 2026 reading selection is the novella “Visiting Composer” by fiction writer and memoirist Andrea Avery, an ASU graduate (BA music ’00, MFA creative writing ’03, and EdD leadership and innovation ’17).

The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly this spring from noon to 1 p.m.

Haven't read the book? Come anyway! Authors are always present.

Synopsis: Winner of the 2024 Miami University Press Novella Prize, “Visiting Composer” is “a brief trip out of time” featuring two 19-year-old women who both want to be composers. One of them, Gloria Clifford, lives in Baltimore in 1910. But after falling down a staircase and hitting her head, she crash-lands in Enid Bluff’s music theory class in Arizona … in 1996. What follows is a story about friendship, the struggle to be both a woman and an artist, and those imbalances of power which end up repeating like unfortunate refrains, time and again.

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative hosted in partnership between the Department of English and ASU Library.

More information: https://asuevents.asu.edu/event/asu-book-group-visiting-composer-andrea-avery

You may also like the following events from ASU Department of English:

• Next month, 26th March, 04:00 pm, Chaucer Celebration Lecture by Holly A. Crocker: 'Sense and Subjectivity' in Tempe
• Next month, 27th March, 09:30 am, Chaucer Exhibition in Tempe
• This April, 23rd April, 12:00 pm, ASU Book Group: ‘Climate Imagination’ edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn in Tempe

Also check out other Arts events in Tempe, Literary Art events in Tempe, Workshops in Tempe.