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Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union Market

Nov12
PastWorkshopWashington, DC

Carol Mitchell — A Good Haunting: Stories- with Lisa Page — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, November 12, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

A beautifully written and often speculative story collection infused with Caribbean and African myths and cultures, exploring love, betrayal, motherhood, death, and home.GROUNDED IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND INFUSED WITH TRADITIONS of Africa and the Caribbean, A Good Haunting: Stories spins myth, magic, and realism into heartrending tales of characters seeking love and connection. Death is the primary antagonist in each of these stories, sometimes appearing as death of self, other times as death of a loved one, and often as both.In the title story, “A Good Haunting,” a widower in the midst of an unorthodox death ritual uses humor to deal with grief and guilt while coming to terms with unsavory details about his spouse’s sudden death. In “The Way of the Volt,” an eighteenth-century African queen is made immortal, sold into slavery, and left to face a series of impossible choices that force her to struggle with what it means to be human. In “The Sunset Toll,” members of the last community on earth disappear one by one until there are just three people left, trying to maintain hope even as they question the forces that keep them trapped on earth.The characters wrestle with foes, agonize at crossroads, and face painful truths, all while grappling with grief, love, betrayal, motherhood, and ideas of home. Some triumph, some do not—but they all emerge irrevocably changed by their experiences.Carol Mitchell is the author of the short story collection A Good Haunting: Stories, the novel What Start Bad a Mornin’, and nineteen books for children. Her book reviews and short stories have appeared in numerous journals. She holds an MFA and is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and several other arts institutions. By day, Mitchell teaches writing to support her current nightly obsession: working on her new novel.Mitchell will be in conversation with Lisa Page, co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America, (Beacon Press). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub Weekly, The Crisis, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Playboy, the Washington Post Book World, Playbill, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications and anthologies, including Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race (Doubleday). She has worked as a freelance writer, editor, speechwriter, lyricist, instructor, actor and literary consultant. She created the Playboy College Fiction Contest. She is the former President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Lisa Page is assistant professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the George Washington University where she previously served as Interim Director of Africana Studies. She is also a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers’ Workshop. She lives outside Washington, DC.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov10
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Aaron John Curtis — Old School Indian — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Tuesday, November 10, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

There There meets All Fours in this irreverent coming-of-middle-age story about an Indigenous man’s hunger for intimacy, healing, and a second chance.Abe Jacobs is Kanien’kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne―or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back. He met the love of his life, started writing poetry, and began an open marriage.Now at forty-three, Abe is suffering from a rare disease―one his doctors in Miami believe will kill him. Running from his diagnosis and a marriage teetering on collapse, Abe returns to the Rez, where he’s persuaded to undergo a healing at the hands of his Great Uncle Budge. But Budge―a wry, recovered alcoholic prone to wearing punk T-shirts―isn’t all that convincing. And Abe’s time off the Rez has made him a thorough skeptic.To heal, Abe will undertake a revelatory journey, confronting the parts of himself he’s hidden ever since he left home and wrestling with the imprint left by his once-passionate marriage.Delivered with crackling wit and heart-wrenching tenderness, Old School Indian is a striking exploration of the power and secrets of family, the capacity for healing and intimacy, and the ripple effects of history and culture.Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he'll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Aaron has judged for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance prizes, the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Since 2004, Aaron has been Quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. He lives in Miami.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov8
PastStory TimeWashington, DC

Pages and Purrs - A Storytime with Cats! - with Tiny Cat Animal Rescue

11:00 AM • Sunday, November 8, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

Bring in your kids for an extra special story time - with cats and kittens! Tiny Cat Animal Rescue will be swinging by with some of their adoptable feline friends, so everyone can listen and cuddle. After the story is read, stick around and keep playing with the cats, and get in line for some cat-themed face painting.Tiny Cat Animal Rescue is a volunteer-run, foster-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of cats living on the streets, reducing the number of cats living on the streets, and preventing cats from ending up on the streets in the first place.

Nov7
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Frances Park — AHN LOVE - with Sean Collins — at Union Market

6:00 PM • Saturday, November 7, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

A dreamy, poignant romp, Ahn Love opens with Margaret visiting her widowed father, Sam Ahn, on his ninetieth birthday. His crippling loneliness—anchored in the belief that if his orchids ever bloom, his late wife will return—transports Margaret back to the summer of 1969 and the Ahns’ seven-day cruise across the Pacific.On that fateful voyage, a teenage Margaret—nicknamed Monkey—witnessed the unraveling of her family: her beloved but servile Uncle Bong’s betrayal, her mother’s fateful encounter with a Brazilian playboy, and the first stirrings of her own awakening. Amid the glittering decks and restless seas, Margaret experiences the dizzying highs and crushing lows of youth—magic, tragic, exotic, and erotic—all new to her, including a brief but intoxicating romance with the dashing Adam Kang, a young Korean Brit.As memory and present entwine, Ahn Love becomes a tender meditation on desire, loss, and the fragile beauty of time—where the seeds of love and heartbreak are sown in equal measure.Frances Park is a Korean American author of novels and memoirs published around the world. Her books have been praised by The Straits Times, The Washington Post, The Korea Times, USA Today, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Times, The Korean Quarterly, The Taipei Times, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, CNN, Newsweek, and Good Morning America.Her stories reflect an identity shaped by two worlds. In her novel Blue Rice, a Korean woman who survived the war must adjust to 1960s white America while confronting the pain of her husband’s desertion. Her poignant novel The Summer My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon explores the spiritual dislocation of two Korean American sisters growing up in Washington, DC suburbia in the 1970s. Her memoir-in-essays That Lonely Spell was praised by Kirkus Reviews as “a fresh take on the Korean American memoir by a writer from a generation whose voice has seldom been heard.”Frances’s award-winning short stories and essays have appeared in over fifty literary magazines, including O, The Oprah Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The Columbia Journal, The London Magazine, Arts & Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, and The Chicago Quarterly. The loss of her father at a young age haunts much of her writing. In Ahn Love, she imagines him as he might have been had he lived to the age of ninety. Frances lives outside Washington, DC. Visit her at parksisters.com.Park will be joined in conversation with Sean Collins, a writer and photographer, as well as an editor at The Washington Post where he covers politics. Currently at work on his first novel, his work has been published in Vox, The Chromatic Watch, and Blavity. His photography has been exhibited in the UK and US and can be viewed at seanpagecollins.com. Originally from Chicago, he lives in Washington, DC with his wife and daughter. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov5
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

The Hour: Poetry Open Mic — Created and hosted by poet María Fernanda — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, November 5, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

"A new year begins, our first writings and early drafts rise from a plant like callus tissue, forming along our experiences, our conversations, a garden. Every line revives a leaf, a stem, a root." — María Fernanda.Sign up on-site to share your work aloud at our newest open mic series curated by award-winning poet María Fernanda (she/hers). She believes that Poetry, like us, exists in many forms—spoken word, blues, performance/theatre, hip-hop, and more. Bring poems, songs, raps, monologues, positive affirmations and more! Literary work at any creative stage is welcomed: new sh*t, draft, final, published, published-but-the-poem-been-lookin-a-little-different-now and more! Each reader will have approximately 3 minutes to make room for as many readers as possible. Hosted by poet María Fernanda (she/hers). This event is one-hour.María Fernanda (she/hers) is a poet from DC. Her work explores the intimacy of sisterhood, the anchor of intergenerational coexistence, and grief. Awarded the Norma Elia Cantú Award in Creative Writing, her work appears in The Healing Verse Poetry Line, Cave Canem’s Dogbytes, Cheryl Clarke's born in a bed of good lessons: poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton, and more. She is the founder of a poetry garden, where Black poets and gardeners discuss their creative and historic connections to gardens. Connect with her at mariafernandapoet.com and @poetrywithmariafernanda.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct29
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Zaina Arafat — Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope - with Stephanie Merry — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 29, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

A poignant, moving essay collection on the longing and hope of living in diaspora and what it means to be Palestinian today, from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of You Exist Too Much.Fewer and fewer Palestinians living in the diaspora today have direct experiences of their homeland. How can they maintain a connection to a land so volatile, ever shrinking, and nearly unattainable? And how can a child of diaspora raise a child of diaspora, at a time when Palestinians throughout the world—particularly those living in their homeland—are more vulnerable than ever to censorship, violence, and erasure?Luminous, joyous, and evocative, Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope is Zaina Arafat's highly anticipated follow-up to her award-winning novel You Exist Too Much. In essays that move from Nablus to the Appalachian Mountains and from Amman to Manhattan, Arafat reveals “in a singularly compelling voice” (Leslie Jamison) that to live in diaspora is to exist in a state of longing: longing to be elsewhere, longing to return home, and longing to know what home is. A call to action and a call to love, Our Arab holds many truths at once—about society, identity, and family—and flashes with radical compassion, fierce pride, bitter loss, and righteous anger, forming an incredibly complex portrait of what it means to be Palestinian today.Zaina Arafat is the author of Our Arab and the debut novel You Exist Too Much, winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Granta, Harper's Bazaar, The Believer, Vice, and BuzzFeed. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives with her family in New York.Joining Arafat in conversation will be Stephanie Merry, a features editor at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2008. She previously served as deputy editor of The Post's Book World and was a staff writer covering movies, television and other forms of cultureThis event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct24
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Joanne Hyppolite & Toni Greenbaum — Bodyworks: The Jewelry of Art Smith - with Karen Davidov — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Saturday, October 24, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

Explore the wearable modern art of Art Smith, one of the world’s most celebrated 20th-century jewelersThis striking jewelry coffee table book features 160 photos of more than 60 jewelry piecesMid-century modernist jeweler Art Smith (1917-1982) considered the human body to be as integral to his jewelry as the metals, wire, and semiprecious stones he used to make it, calling his necklaces “neck pieces” and his rings “hand decorations.” Bodyworks: The Jewelry of Art Smith presents 160 images, including previously unpublished design sketches and historic photographs alongside newly commissioned photography. Together, they offer a comprehensive visual record of Smith’s bold, fluid, and creative designs, including: “Lava” bracelet which evokes volcanic movement through its layers of long, curving, and patinated sheet metal“Lil’s Wire” pendant, inspired by the atom, representing Smith’s interest in mid-century scientific discoveries and the space age“Minetta” necklace with a carnelian stone, whose name alludes to the historical Little Africa neighborhood in New York CityArt Smith was influenced by jazz, dance, visual art, pan-African regalia, and relationships he formed with New York’s African American arts community. In his Greenwich village studio, he created custom pieces for many high-profile clients, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and jazz pianist Duke Ellington, and had work featured in Vogue. Art Smith was a luminary to his contemporaries and remains one to today's artists. With stunning photography and essays that reflect on his life, influences, and legacy, Bodyworks is the magnificent retrospective Smith's pioneering career deserves.The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. Joanne Hyppolite is the Assistant Director for Culture at the museum and curator of the Cultural Expressions permanent exhibition which showcases Art Smith's work. Under her direction, the museum has acquired two major archival collections on Art Smith.Toni Greenbaum is an art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century jewelry and metalwork. She has written extensively on modernist jewelry, including Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960, considered the standard text on the subject.Moderating the conversation will be Karen Davidov, an independent art and design producer, and founder of the Jewelry Library in New York City.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct22
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Patricia Grace King — Those Who Vanish - with Anna Lapera — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 22, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

Winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeTaking place during the decades-long civil conflict, Those Who Vanish follows the stories of Guatemalan citizens and North American expats set on a collision course by war. Across eight stories, martyrs and missionaries, guerrillas and gringos are thrown together amid political violence. A peace worker shelters a rebel fighter. An exile returns to confront the legacy of her parents' murders. The Virgin Mary begins appearing above an elderly woman's stove. Set in a world of daily disappearances, the collection addresses a vital question: when all certainties are snatched away, what remains of lives, of memory, of faith?Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the UK, where she resides. Her work has won the Miami University Novella Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, and the Florida Review’s Leiby Prize. Other stories have been published by Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, and Nimrod. A former Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, she has received additional support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the British Library. Those Who Vanish is her first book.King will be in conversation with Anna Lapera, a Guatemalan-American author and educator. Her debut novel, Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice, is an International Latino Book Award winner, a 2025 International Literacy Association Honor Book, and was named one of the Best of 2024 by the New York Public Library, and others. Her forthcoming 2028 novel, Birdsong in the Long Night, is a YA thriller set in 1978 Guatemala City that follows a burgeoning journalist as she awakens to the resistance movements unfolding around her and uncovers the truth about the mother she believed to be long dead. C.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct17
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Kevin D. Dumouchelle — African Art Works: Artists Creating Change / The Jack Faxon Collection & The Here Project Pride and Belonging in African Art - with Mark Auslander — at Union Market

6:00 PM • Saturday, October 17, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

This event will be celebrating the release of two books for Kevin D. Dumouchelle; African Art Works & The Here Project.-African Art Works: Artists Creating Change / The Jack Faxon CollectionThis stunning tribute to African art features more than 200 photos, paintings, sculptures, and textiles from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art's collections.This marvelous volume features the African art collection of Michigan state legislator Jack Faxon (1936–2020) bequeathed to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. African Art Works looks at how artists, communities, and collectors have sought to make change in their own personal lives, in their social interactions, and in their relationships to the world and beyond, through art.Essays reflect on the role of art as a call to action, the act of collecting African art, and Jack Faxon's legacy driven by his work in the arts, education, and public service. African Art Works is a stunning and enlightening tribute to art that works to transform the world.-The Here Project: Pride and Belonging in African Art200 stunning images in this companion book to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art exhibition celebrates more than 60 LGBTQ+ African artistsWe are here. This powerful volume platforms artists whose work reflects their identities and experiences as African LGBTQ+ individuals. Its very existence challenges homophobia by centering queer voices and visions amidst historical legacies of erasure and repression. At the same time, the LGBTQ+ experience in Africa is not monolithic. Political, social, and cultural freedoms and limits vary widely across both the continent and the wider diaspora, and the artists represented here have also been selected to help readers recognize that diversity.More than 200 stunning images represent a range of media, including painting, photography, digital art, fashion, installation, and performance. The empowering and evocative imagery makes visible marginalized bodies and lives: Athi-Patra Ruga’s tapestry Versatile Queen presents himself in drag to confront normative ideas of Blackness and masculinity; Zanele Muholi’s self-portrait Muholi Muholi, Parktown uses makeup and saturation to highlight the blackness of their skin tone in contrast to prevailing representations of Black women; Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s sculpture of a man with rainbow blown glass bananas atop his head recalls exoticized colonial imagery.In its continental and diasporic survey of queer African art and artists, The Here Project is rare in its scope and scale and pays beautiful tribute to contemporary artists making essential work.-The SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART is uniquely focused on collecting, caring for, and connecting visitors with art from Africa across media, geography, and time—from the 10th century to today. -Kevin D. Dumouchelle leads the curatorial department at the National Museum of African Art, where he has developed exhibitions that include Heroes: Principles of African Greatness and Visionary: Viewpoints on Africa’s Arts, which won an Association of Art Museums Curators Award for Excellence. He has written books and articles on a wide range of topics and curated exhibitions on both contemporary and historical African art.Dumouchelle will be joined in conversation with Mark Auslander PhD, a sociocultural and historical anthropologist, currently teaches at American University in Washington DC. He has published extensively on art, ritual, race, and the politics of difference. He is author of the award-winning book, The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct15
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Nafissa Thompson-Spires — The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford - with Nic Stone — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 15, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

From the author of the multi-award-winning, National Book Award–longlisted, “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders) story collection Heads of the Colored People, comes a sly, spry, tall tale of a debut novel about the murder of an infamous moonshiner and the cacophony of true stories a small town can tell about itself.Rich Milford is dead. At last.We find ourselves in Oklahoma, just far enough out of Tulsa, just long enough after the Massacre of 1921. For as long as anyone can remember, the Milfords have led plentiful lives on the backs of the townspeople of Newville. Now, on the ominous brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford is an infamous moonshiner and womanizer and, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with no one but his women to mourn him but a question remains: who killed him, and why?Top suspects are his four “wives,” Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light in a volley of competing narratives, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes.In an electric follow-up to her beloved and critically acclaimed debut collection, Nafissa Thompson-Spires once again serves up a brilliant distillation of front-of-mind happenings—think, cults of personality, capitalism run amok in politics, and rampant societal distrust—this time magicked into taut historical fiction structured as a stupefying line dance. In her uniquely powerful, humorous manner, Thompson-Spires takes on the interdependent clash of the traditional and the new-fangled in this genre-bending, gob-smackingly excellent debut.Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and several other prizes, including an NAACP Image Award. She is also the recipient of a Whiting Award. She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Illinois. With dark humor and covering topics from identity to chronic illness, her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review’s “The Daily,” New York magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications. New writing appears in Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Grant. Her young adult debut is forthcoming with Make Me a World. The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford is her debut novel.Thompson-Spires will be joined in conversation with Nic Stone, the author of many novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Dear Martin, its New York Times bestselling sequel Dear Justyce, and the final national bestselling installment Dear Manny, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection and a CBC Kids Top Ten Favorite in the 9th–12th grade category. She also penned the young adult titles Odd One Out, an NPR Best Book and an ALA Rainbow Book Top Ten; Jackpot, the YALSA Quick Pick selection that takes a searing look at economic inequality; and Chaos Theory, a Southern Book Prize finalist and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection. Her middle-grade novels include Clean Getaway, a New York Times bestseller, and Fast Pitch, a YALSA Quick Pick selection. Nic lives in Atlanta and will continue to write the books she feels are missing.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct13
PastBook ClubWashington, DC

Imbolo Mbue — Every Story Is a Love Story - with Angie Kim — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Tuesday, October 13, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

From the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers, a captivating novel about love lost—and the weight of regretWhat if I’d never gotten into that car? What if I’d pulled out of the driveway five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later?Three years ago, Wolo’s pregnant wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future: the twins they were expecting, the PhD she was on the cusp of finishing, and the house they’d just bought in New Jersey. In the face of a loss that seemed insurmountable, Wolo has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life: he goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older women in his family. The grief that dogged him has, with time, become a little gentler.Until a letter arrives one day, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. Wolo’s family pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil; his mother expressly forbids him from making further mention of it; his father’s second wife calls, from Cameroon, to tell him to destroy it. But Wolo ponders it for days, and ultimately agrees to meet with the woman who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman affects him in ways he had never imagined, and he begins to wonder if the long road to healing can be shared. What do we owe to those who have hurt us? Are we defined by our worst moments and our deepest regrets? And, more than anything, can forgiveness ease our suffering? Moving and full of life, Every Story Is a Love Story charts the uneven path from heartbreak to healing.Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African village’s fight against an American oil company, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue lives in New York.Mbue will be in conversation with Angie Kim, who moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. After graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, she studied philosophy at Stanford University and attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award, the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award, and the Pinckley Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the Today show. Angie Kim lives in northern Virginia with her family.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct10
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Emily Yahr — Taylor Swift: The Debut Years - with Chris Richards — at Union Market

6:00 PM • Saturday, October 10, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

Meet Taylor, 2003. She's a teen who came to Nashville with blisters on her fingers from learning to play a 12-string guitar. In every room she enters, she’s the youngest person (by decades) and often the only woman. And if anyone asked if she could see herself becoming the biggest superstar on the planet, her answer probably would have been yes.Writing alongside industry veterans after school, Taylor Swift’s songwriting ability set her apart. But her origins are more complex than a teen tapping into a new generation of country music fans. It’s a story of taking risks, like walking away from powerhouse label RCA to strike out with an unknown, unfunded new label, and of trusting her instincts when no one else did.Washington Post reporter Emily Yahr pulls back the curtain on the country music industry—from executives who said yes to Taylor (and those who regret saying no), to collaborators like Scott Borchetta, Nathan Chapman, and Liz Rose, to Nashville itself. Intimate and immersive, Yahr takes us to iconic locations like Music Row and The Bluebird Cafe, as well as to Hendersonville High and the Swifts’ own lakefront house.Taylor Swift: The Debut Years tells the definitive origin story of today’s biggest star, with never-before-published interviews. Taylor’s decade in Nashville shaped her as a musician, and ultimately changed country music itself long after she left the genre.Emily Yahr is an award-winning pop culture reporter in the Style section at The Washington Post, where she writes about TV, celebrities, music and movies. She is known for her coverage of country music and her coverage of Taylor Swift. Her first book is Taylor Swift: The Debut Years, a deep dive into Taylor Swift’s first 10 years in Nashville as a country music star. Yahr lives in Washington, DC.Yahr will be in conversation with Chris Richards.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct8
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Lindsay Merbaum — Witches of the Wheel — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 8, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

In her metaphysical mystery Witches of the Wheel, Lindsay Merbaum weaves a spellbinding tale of mythology, bartending, and queer belonging.Gold grows up knowing only a few things about herself: something lets her see ghosts and read her neighbors' secrets, and her mother seems to hate her. But when she strikes out on her own, she stumbles into a job at The Wheel, a literally-underground lesbian bar where a coven gathers every Thursday and each entrance requires a painful sacrifice. It feels like the first place she's belonged.But the bar, its patrons, and its history are more complicated, and more dangerous, than Gold ever realized. As she entangles herself in her new community, she learns more about herself than she wanted to know--and attracts an ancient goddess's deadly attention.Lindsay Merbaum is a queer feminist author and high priestess of home mixology. Her award-nominated short fiction has appeared in PANK, Anomalous Press, The Collagist, Epiphany, Gargoyle, Day One, Harpur Palate, and Hobart, among others. Essays and interviews can also be found in Electric Literature, Bustle, Bitch Media, The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and more. A 2021 Foreword Indies Finalist, The Gold Persimmon was her first novel with Creature Publishing. Her second book, a smutty horror-comedy novella called Vampires at Sea, was a LibraryReads Bonus Pick. Lindsay lives in Flint, Michigan with her partner and cats.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct3
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Shara McCallum — BEHOLD - with Chet'la Sebree — at Union Market

6:00 PM • Saturday, October 3, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

Born of the poet's longstanding love of visual art, especially painting, Behold examines why we love what we love, and how we see (and are seen) by art. When we say we "saw" something, McCallum asks, what is it that we saw--outside of us, and within?Over two years spent working on this book, McCallum traveled to museums in the U.S. and abroad with the explicit goal of standing before works of art created by contemporary Caribbean, Black, and women artists. The resulting collection works to untangle what it means to locate oneself within the frame--to imagine belonging by entering the scene.Behold begins as a dialogue, a call and response traversing the territory McCallum is known for: history, interiority, identity, and the ways bodies present themselves in the world. These poems explore fulfillment and connection, the labor of seeking, the ache of loss, and the histories carried within the self. They are meditations on the existence of place within us, the way it is seeded within, and seeds us.From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for No Ruined Stone, OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize for Madwoman, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for The Water Between Us, among others. McCallum teaches at Penn State University and served as the Penn State Laureate from 2021-2022.McCallum will be in conversation with Chet'la Sebree, the author of the debut essay collection Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home, forthcoming from The Dial Press on May 5, 2026. She is also the author of three poetry collections: Blue Opening (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, Lambda Literary Bisexual Poetry Award finalist, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection); Field Study (winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets); and Mistress (New Issues Poetry Prize Winner and NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry finalist). She is an assistant professor of English at the George Washington University and teaches in Randolph College’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct2
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

[NOW AT UNION MARKET]Hernan Diaz — Ply - with Tope Folarin — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Friday, October 2, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

THIS EVENT WILL NOW TAKE PLACE AT POLITICS AND PROSE AT UNION MARKET. You can find information on parking at Union Market here: https://unionmarketdc.com/directions/All books will be pre-signed by the author.Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could change the very fabric of reality.After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz defies expectations with his third and gives us a breathtaking glimpse into the future. A major achievement from a major contemporary writer, Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind. It is a novel of ideas built from a story of people. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust, one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the Century. His previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.Diaz will be in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC, who serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. Tope serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. In addition, he will serve as the inaugural critic-at-large for The Georgia Review in 2025.

Oct1
PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

The Hour: Poetry Open Mic — Created and hosted by poet María Fernanda — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 1, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

"A new year begins, our first writings and early drafts rise from a plant like callus tissue, forming along our experiences, our conversations, a garden. Every line revives a leaf, a stem, a root." — María Fernanda.Sign up on-site to share your work aloud at our newest open mic series curated by award-winning poet María Fernanda (she/hers). She believes that Poetry, like us, exists in many forms—spoken word, blues, performance/theatre, hip-hop, and more. Bring poems, songs, raps, monologues, positive affirmations and more! Literary work at any creative stage is welcomed: new sh*t, draft, final, published, published-but-the-poem-been-lookin-a-little-different-now and more! Each reader will have approximately 3 minutes to make room for as many readers as possible. Hosted by poet María Fernanda (she/hers). This event is one-hour.María Fernanda (she/hers) is a poet from DC. Her work explores the intimacy of sisterhood, the anchor of intergenerational coexistence, and grief. Awarded the Norma Elia Cantú Award in Creative Writing, her work appears in The Healing Verse Poetry Line, Cave Canem’s Dogbytes, Cheryl Clarke's born in a bed of good lessons: poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton, and more. She is the founder of a poetry garden, where Black poets and gardeners discuss their creative and historic connections to gardens. Connect with her at mariafernandapoet.com and @poetrywithmariafernanda.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Sep30
PastBook SigningWashington, DC

[NOW AT UNION MARKET]Ayad Akhtar — The Radiance - with Jeffrey Goldberg — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Wednesday, September 30, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at Union MarketFree

THIS EVENT WILL NOW TAKE PLACE AT POLITICS AND PROSE AT UNION MARKET. You can find information on parking at Union Market here: https://unionmarketdc.com/directions/This event will be followed by a signing line with the author. When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. Akhtar is the author of the novels American Dervish, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and Homeland Elegies, named one of 10 Best Books of 2020 by The New York Times. He has also authored the plays McNeal, Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand. Akhtar was named the New York State Author in 2021.Akhtar will be in conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg. Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic. He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named editor in chief, the 15th person to serve as editor in The Atlantic's 168-year history. During his editorship, The Atlantic has set new audience and subscription records, and won its first-ever Pulitzer Prizes. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, The Atlantic received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the top award in the industry.Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg served as the Middle East correspondent and then the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. Earlier in his career, he was a writer for The New York Times Magazine. He began his career as a police reporter for The Washington Post. Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror and On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he also served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and as the distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Goldberg is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for Reporting; the Daniel Pearl Award for Reporting; the Overseas Press Club’s award for human-rights reporting; the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize for best investigative reporting.