Kimberly King Parsons, Author of Black Light Book

Join us on Tuesday, August 13 at 7pm for an evening with Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light, in conversation with Genevieve Hudson, author of Pretend We Live Here.

With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.

Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise.

“The stories in Black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush. . . . I loved every moment of this book.” —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

Born in Lubbock, Texas, Kimberly King Parsons received her MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in Best Small Fictions 2017, New South, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among others.

Genevieve Hudson is the author of the forthcoming novel Boys of Alabama (W.W. Norton/Liveright), the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018), which is a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published in Catapult, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Tin House Summer Workshops, and artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Dickinson House.