The following description comes from the event organizer.

Join us for a genre-bending launch party for two debut authors with their sights set on the universe. Poet Katie Prince’s Tell This to the Universe and novelist Emet North’s In Universes both use the multiverse as a way to explore desire, grief, and the search for belonging. The authors will read briefly from their books and then talk together about the joys and dangers of blending physics and art. If you’ve ever stayed up at night contemplating alternate lives, this might be the event for you. Come grab a drink, eat a cupcake, and ask all the burning multiverse questions you’ve had since watching Everything Everywhere All At Once.* 

*Answers not guaranteed to be correct since neither author is actually a physicist.

Books, provided by Elliott Bay Book Company, will be available for purchase and signing after the event.


ABOUT THE BOOKS
 
Tell This to the Universe                                                                                        
There is an absence at the heart of Katie Prince’s Tell This to the Universe, and the obsessive search to find what’s missing propels the reader through a dizzying multiverse of poems that are equal parts sincere, darkly funny, absurd, and devastating. Like moons around faraway planets, the poems orbit the strange and brutal landscapes of longing, alienation, and grief as they move through physics to philosophy, linguistics to mathematics, fairy tales to science fiction.

It could be said that this book is trying to find god—to name it, to hurt it or hold it, to make desperate demands of it—but it’s just as true to say it’s looking for a home, a family, an answer to a question it still doesn’t know how to ask.

In Universes
In Universes follows a queer physicist’s search for belonging across time and space. Raffi works in an observational cosmology lab, searching for dark matter and trying to hide how little they understand their own research. Every chance they get, they escape to see Britt, a queer sculptor who fascinates them for reasons they also don’t—or won’t—understand. As Raffi’s carefully constructed life begins to collapse, they become increasingly fixated on the multiverse and the idea that somewhere, there might be a universe where they mean as much to Britt as she does to them…

In Universes is a mind-bending tour across parallel worlds, each an answer to the question of what life would be like if events had played out just a little differently. Blending realism with science fiction, In Universes explores the thirst for genius, the fluidity of gender and identity, and the pull of the past against the desire to lead a meaningful life. Part Ted Chiang, part Carmen Maria Machado, part Everything Everywhere All At Once, In Universes insists on the transgressive power of hope even in the darkest of times.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Katie Prince is a poet and essayist. Her first poetry book, Tell This to the Universe, was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and won the 2021 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books. In the spring of 2017, she served as artist-in-residence at Klaustrið, in Iceland’s Fljótsdalur valley, and in 2019, she received a GAP Award from Artist Trust to continue working on the project she began there. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, New South, Fugue, the Adroit Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. You can find her online at www.katieprince.com.

Emet North has lived in a dozen states over the past decade and has no fixed residence, though they feel most at home in the mountains. In previous lives, they worked in an observational cosmology lab on a grant from NASA, taught snowboarding in Montana, researched Lie algebras, led wine tastings, waited tables, trained horses, and wrote a thesis on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. They translate from Spanish to English with a particular focus on queer and trans voices and are always looking for new projects.