We had such a great time hosting Heather Lang and Jennifer Battisti for a reading of their forthcoming titles! If you missed the event, we’ve got you covered. The recording is now up on our YouTube channel and the Q&A session is also included! Please check out their books and support them if you’re able!
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- Watch this video/listen to their work
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Within the pages of Battisti’s Off Boulder Highway—a hybrid work of poetry, memoir, and surrealistic prose—we encounter Vegas landmarks that act as characters, Reagan era disasters, the loss of a father. Jennifer Battisti—an ‘80s latchkey kid, now mother—transforms narrative into a pop-culture artifact filled with people as beautiful as they are broken, unexpected heroes like L.L. Cool J and Hulk Hogan, trauma, addiction, disaster, and ritualistic paths to redemption.
Order: https://tolsunbooks.com/shop/off-boulder-highway
Lang-Cassera’s Gathering Broken Light confronts pasts we cannot understand, largely following the October 2017 mass shooting. Anchored in the severity and the beauty of the Mojave Desert landscape, fractured narratives, surrealist repetition, and imagistic lyricism work to contemplate grief, including both overwhelming sorrow and deep love. To those lost by gun violence, a voice yearns, “I wish I could sing the sky to you.”
Order: https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/…/gatheringbrokenlight…
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Jennifer Battisti is a Las Vegas native. She was awarded “Best Local Writer” by the readers of the Desert Companion (2019). Her chapbook, Echo Bay, was released in 2018 (Tolsun Books). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Where We Live, an anthology of writing and graphic arts in response to the October 1 tragedy, Western Humanities Review, Slant, Thin Air Magazine, Coe Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Desert Companion, Helen: A Literary Magazine, El Portal, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been on exhibit in the Nevada Humanities program gallery and the Nevada State College program gallery. She is the co-director of and a Teaching Artist for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in Clark County.
Website: https://www.jenniferbattisti.com/.
Heather Lang-Cassera is a Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate Emeritus (2019-2021). She was named 2017 “Best Local Writer or Poet” by the readers of Nevada Public Radio’s Desert Companion. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry with a Certificate in Literary Translation from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Heather serves Nevada State College as a Lecturer teaching Creative Writing, College Success, and more, where she is also a Faculty Advisor for the writing club and the literary magazine, 300 Days of Sun. She is a founder and Editor of Tolsun Books and a World Literature Editor and Literary Critic with The Literary Review. Her poems have been published by Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Normal School, North American Review, Raleigh Review, and South Dakota Review, among many other publications. Heather’s forthcoming book of poems, Gathering Broken Light, written with the support of a Nevada Arts Council Project Grant, is available for presale through Unsolicited Press. Website: http://heatherlang.cassera.net/.
