Babylon Salon
presents a special performance
Saturday, March 1, 2025
in The Sycamore's outdoor patio
2140 Mission St, San Francisco [16th St BART]
Come for drinks at 5 // Show starts at 5.30pm
featuring
Nina Schuyler
[In This Ravishing World; Afterword]
"In this ravishing book, you will find stories that lift your heart and stories that break it. Powerfully beautiful and beautifully powerful, Schuyler has written exactly the book this moment needs." — Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of Booth.
Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. Her novel, Afterword, won the 2024 PenCraft Book of the Year in Fiction, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary, and the PenCraft Spring Seasonal Book Award for Literary and Science Fiction. Her novel, The Translator, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. She has a new edition of How to Write Stunning Sentences coming out in 2026. She teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the independent bookstore, Book Passage.
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sam sax
[Yr Dead; Pig; Bury It]
“This is poetry as preservation, as an unrelinquished archive of ghosts, but mostly, it arrives, to our luck, as a testament of a self earned and re-earned, like how yellowness, caught in its own dizzying light, turns itself golden.” - Ocean Vuong
sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of Yr Dead (Longlisted for the National Book Award), Pig (Best Book of 2023: Vulture and Electric Lit) as well as Madness (winner of The National Poetry Series) and ‘Bury It’ (winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets). They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam's received fellowships from The NEA, Poetry Foundation, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.
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Emily Jon Tobias
[Monarch]
"This remarkable debut collection that traverses many of the parts of America that are unseen, or at least, unseen in this way, and gives us a wealth of material to engage with and themes that make a collection worth biting into – loyalty, betrayal, happiness and deep sorrow, addiction and victory and a reclamation of selves against the nearly impossible grind of modern American life." --Chris Abani, author of Graceland
Emily Jon Tobias is an American author and poet. She is an award-winning writer whose work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, along with other honorable mentions, and has been featured in various literary journals and magazines. Her debut collection MONARCH: STORIES (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) won the American Book Fest International Book Award and an International Impact Book Award. The collection was further honored as a 2024 finalist in the American Book Fest Fiction Awards, a distinguished favorite in the NYC Big Book Award, second place winner in the Story Monsters Royal Dragonfly Award, and a third place winner in the 2025 Feathered Quill Book Awards Program. Currently, Emily is a proud mentor in the PEN Prison Writing Mentorship Program. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University Oregon. Midwestern-raised, she now lives and writes on the coast of Southern California.
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Jon Hickey
[Big Chief]
“All politics is local meets all unhappy families in this comical, humane, and profound debut—a deftly observed meditation on what it means to be a brother, a son, a leader, and a man. Jon Hickey is a newly minted master of slapstick American misery, and Big Chief a big-hearted book, a big mood for the big mess we’re all in.”—J. Robert Lennon, author of Hard Girls and Buzz Kill
Jon Hickey is a writer from Minnesota. He earned an MFA from Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and the Massachusetts Review, among other places. He is a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Chippewa Indians (Anishinaabe). He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
Mercilee Jenkins
[Words You Can’t Eat in Public]
Dr. Mercilee Jenkins is preoccupied with teaching, writing and performing about gender and sexuality. Her solo performance, It’s Later Than You Think was developed and presented at Stage Werx, 3 Girls Theatre and the Playwrights Lab. Her 10-minute play, 50 Love Letters, was selected for The Road Theatre Company’s 2021 Summer Festival. Her one act play, Winning, is included in Best American Short Plays 2014-15. Her poems have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Reinventing Home, The Healing Muse and various other academic and small press journals and anthologies. She was a 2014 winner of Poets Eleven, San Francisco’s citywide poetry contest. Her poetry chapbook, Words You Can’t Eat in Public, is due out this summer.
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in partnership with our friends
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