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Exhibit B presents Fatimah Asghar, Shivani Gupta, C. Russell Price, and Julia Z Caisip
Past event
Featured Book
Daughter of the Mountains
A tender, searching collection that breaks open notions of faith to ask how a daughter, alienated from kin, can find love and a home in the world, from the award-winning author of If They Come for Us and When We Were Sisters
“There is, in Daughter of the Mountains, an almost supernatural sense of connectedness, compassion. It’s a blueprint and a manifesto. I sit in stunned gratitude at its guidance.”—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!
at the edge of an edge
is an edge. at that edge
is a cliff. beyond that cliff
is me.
Exiled from ancestral homelands, how can one find a place for themself in the world? In this stunning sophomore collection, the acclaimed poet Fatimah Asghar unweaves residual grief to reckon with their relationship to Allah, long-estranged but deeply loved kin, the landscape of their ancestors, and love itself.
In meditative poems, Daughter of the Mountains grapples with multiple facets of fulfillment, betrayal, love, loss, and longing, illustrating how place, lineage, and environment inform the practice of spirituality and vice versa. With wisps of humor, imagery that is as beautiful as it is startling, and powerfully disruptive formal invention, this is an intimately lyrical and explosive collection.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
Also Featured
Bisquick
A breathtaking gallop through spectral planes, grief, and ghosts
Grief is a rodeo filled with ghost clowns. In Bisquick: An American Seance, C. Russell Price explores spiritualism and the fetishization of the Midwest cowboy aesthetic, creating a vibrant world inhabited by three unforgettable characters: the speaker, a traumatized eco-anarchist working through grief; Ghost Cowboy, a ghost dream boyfriend hell-bent on hunting predators of the poor; and Bisquick, a blue ghost horse who just wants to dance. This spectral trio boogies, copulates, and fights against a system that ghosted them long before the demise of their physical bodies, determined to stay saddled to their dreams. Price gallops through the widths of time, the geography of the United States, the spectral plane, and the leather BDSM scene as they attempt to answer this provocative collection’s central question: If the dead could talk, wouldn’t they have something better to say?
Our Poetry Coordinator, H. Melt, says of Price's new collection: “Reading C. Russell Price's latest poetry collection feels like admiring flowers in the graveyard on a sunny day. It's the queerness of grief, the beauty and ache of longing to be loved by all our ghosts. It's pleasure and loneliness holding hands, with their fingers intertwined.”
About This Event
Join Exhibit B for the latest installment of their renowned reading series featuring Fatimah Asghar, Shivani Gupta, C. Russell Price, and Julia Z Caisip.
Featured Authors
C. Russell Price
C. Russell Price is the author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other; oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems, and the forthcoming collection Bisquick: An American Seance (out August this year with Northwestern University Prese). They are a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, a member of the editorial collective of The Anarchist Review of Books, and a curatorial board member for the Ragdale Foundation. They landscape in Chicago.
Fatimah Asghar
Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. They also were a co-producer on Ms. Marvel for Disney + and wrote the episode "Time And Again." Along with Safia Elhillo, they are the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans.
Julia Z. Caisip
Julia Z Caisip is a postqueer picara of transfem kapwa, pursuing an undergraduate degree in English at UIC.
Shivani Gupta
Shivani Gupta is a Chicago-based writer, curator & researcher. Her debut chapbook my mother is a mixed metaphor was published by Rockwood Press, and its sister collection Cumulus will be released summer 2026. Her work has featured globally across BBC, Forbes, Edinburgh Fringe, Baby Teeth, Epiphany, Corpus Callosum & more. She has served as an In-Surreal-Life fellow, on the Chicago Poetry Center Board & been supported by the Narrative Shifts residency. She loves sauces, baked goods, pen-pals & all round silliness. Find more of her work here: https://shivanigupta.space
About the Venue
Pilsen Community Books
Pilsen Community Books is a worker owned and operated independent bookstore that specializes in new and used literary fiction, radical history and politics, and literature in translation. The staff's goal is to unite their bookselling experience with their belief that labor is entitled to all it produces.
Visit store pageMore at Pilsen Community Books
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