Writers’ Workshop graduates Alexia Arthurs and Ruth Joffre will read from their fiction debuts.

Alexia Arthurs will read from How to Love A Jamaican. “In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once: some cultivated, some simple, some wickedly funny, some deeply melancholic. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith  Arthurs has been published in Granta, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017. She was born and raised in Jamaica and moved with her family to Brooklyn when she was twelve. She is teaching this Fall at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Ruth Joffre will read from her story collection Night Beast. These doomed love stories and twisted fairytales explore the lives of women and reveal monsters lurking in our daily lives. “Lyrical . . . [and] masterful . . . Perfect for fans of Kelly Link and of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Joffre’s debut collection heralds the arrival of a new, exciting voice in fiction.”―Booklist  Joffre’s work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Masters Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Nashville Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Seattle, where she teaches at the Hugo House.