Babylon Salon
presents a special performance
Saturday, June 15, 2024
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
Sasha Vasilyuk
[Your Presence Is Mandatory]
“A clear-eyed portrayal of how borders move through us, and how surviving war entails enduring many deaths, large and small, within the self” — Esquire
Sasha Vasilyuk is a award-winning journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence is Mandatory that just came out from Bloomsbury in the U.S., and will be published in Italy, France, Germany, Finland, and Brazil this Fall. The novel spans from WWII until the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to San Francisco at the age of 13. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Magazine, USA Today, LA Times, KQED, and elsewhere. Sasha lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.
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Grace Loh Prasad
[The Translator’s Daughter]
“A stunning tribute to the complexities of growing up as a third-culture kid, an honest and moving chronicle of the ‘abundance and loss’ of living across languages and continents.” —Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island
Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.
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Katie M. Flynn
[Island Rule; The Companions]
"A wonderfully eerie collection, Island Rule haunts and delights. Flynn’s writing is taught and teeming, making a world of bone mounds and monsters as alarmingly real as teenage angst and midlife crises. The creeping darkness of Island Rule revels in exploring darkness at the edges of our world, and what happens when we invite it in." —Erika Swyler, author of The Light from Other Stars
Katie M. Flynn is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and Tor.com, among other publications. She’s been awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Her first novel, The Companions, came out in March 2020, and opens during a prolonged pandemic where the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in as companions. Her interlinked collection of short stories, Island Rule, is out now from Gallery Books.
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Elizabeth Stix
[Things I Want Back from You]
“By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, the interlinked collection of stories features achingly alive characters who yearn for connection. An enchanting debut."—Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City
Bay Area native Elizabeth Stix's stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Boulevard, The Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, and elsewhere. She has contributed to numerous anthologies, including Best Microfiction 2019, Drivel, and 642 Things About You (That I Love). Her work was performed live by Selected Shorts in New York and the New Short Fiction Series in LA, and her story “Alice” was optioned by Sneaky Little Sister Films. In the early 2000s, she founded the vanguard lit zine The Big Ugly Review. When she’s not writing, she can be found staying up way too late doing the NYT Spelling Bee.
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Joseph Rios
[Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations]
“The agile flurry of his storytelling is dazzling: Zapata and Lorca, Shakespeare and Borges, Rocky Balboa, family and tías … This is duende and fire, language as pugilism. This is a new poetics at the next level.” -- Lee Herrick
Joseph Rios was named Fresno's Poet Laureate in 2023. He is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations (Omnidawn), winner of the American Book Award and was named one of the Notable Debut Poets by Poets & Writers Magazine for 2017. His poems can be found at Poem A Day, Huizache, The Rumpus, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on Metro buses and trains in Los Angeles. A 2023-2025 Stanford Stegner Fellow, Joe lives in Fresno.
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in partnership with our friends
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