Traversing Genre: A Nightboat Books Reading

Friday, March 6, 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET

Ballroom II, Baltimore Convention Center, Level 400

This reading will feature four of Nightboat’s most prominent authors working across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, presenting a dynamic constellation of writers who work across literary genre. This diverse group explores issues of ecology and ecopoetics; Black women’s lives and archives; class and economic factors; gender, sexuality, and trans identity; and multilingualism and translation in essay, memoir, short stories, novels, and a wide range of poetic forms and prosody.


Panelist Bios:

Samiya Bashir is a poet, artist, writer, performer, educator, and advocate. She is the author of four poetry collections, including I Hope This Helps (Nightboat, 2025) and Field Theories (Nightboat, 2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Awards Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her other books are Gospel (2009), and Where the Apple Falls (2005). Bashir’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, and Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature. She lives in Harlem.

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat, 2025); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the coauthor of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody. She has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Millay Arts. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington, where she teaches at the Evergreen State College.

Photo Credit: Elle Perez

Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and lives in Texas, where her mother was born. She is the author of the novel The Fifth Wound (Nightboat, 2023) and the collection of stories Unsex Me Here (Nightboat, 2025). Her stories have appeared in various magazines and also in exhibitions at the RISD Museum and the Renaissance Society, accompanying portraits by Elle Pérez. She’s sometimes working on a new novel called Seven Come Eleven, sometimes writing country songs, and mostly doing something else. She lives in Los Angeles.






Mónica de la Torre is a poet, translator, and scholar, born and raised in Mexico City. Her books include Pause the Document (Nightboat, 2025), Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat, 2020), Public Domain (2008), and Talk Shows (2007). De la Torre has edited BOMB Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. She is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Creative Capital grant. She teaches poetry and translation at Brooklyn College.
 
Photo Credit: Nat Ward