Babylon Salon
presents a special

online performance
Saturday, June 5, 2021
5pm PST / 8pm EST

featuring

Deesha Philyaw

(The Secret Lives of Church Ladies)
“Tender, fierce, proudly black and beautiful, these stories will sneak inside you and take root.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)


Deesha Philyaw's debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow.

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Meredith Talusan

(Fairest: a Memoir)

"Recounting her coming-of-age as a transgender Filipino-American person with albinism, Talusan sails past the conventions of trans and immigrant memoirs. Rather than flaying her identities one by one, she examines the links between them to illustrate that it is here, in the messy overlap, that a person is made." —Rawiya Kameir, The New York Times
Meredith Talusan
(she/they) is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoir Fairest and has contributed to many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Condé Nast Traveler. She is also founding executive editor and current contributing editor for them., Condé Nast's LGBTQ+ digital platform. They are currently working on a novel.

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Joshua Mohr
(
Model Citizen: A Memoir; Sirens; All This Life)

“From dozens of perfectly honed scenes combined in a mind and soul satisfying structure, Joshua Mohr has made a book that refuses to look away from all the ugliness, yet makes himself so vulnerable in the telling, that every bit of beauty sticks. Relentlessly honest, hilarious, gut-wrenchingly sad, Model Citizen is the opposite of a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps memoir, and all the more hopeful (and profound) for it.” —Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country
Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir Sirens and of several novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called "beat-poet cool." His novel All This Life won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial.
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Emma Copley Eisenberg
(
The Third Rainbow Girl)

"The Third Rainbow Girl is a haunting and hard-to-characterize book about restless women and the things that await them on the road." -- Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, The Washington Post Magazine, and others.

Her first book of nonfiction is The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia which was a NYTimes notable book of 2020 and nominated for an Edgar Award. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. Her next two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, are forthcoming from Hogarth (Penguin Random House).

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with music by

Sunshine Becker

Born Sunshine Garcia on a hot July 1st, Sunshine was born to sing and has been blessed beyond imagination to do it as her full time career. Her primary job since 2009 has been as the sole female member of Furthur, www.furthur.net, where she serves as a backing vocalist to support the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh and Bob Weir. She recently established a new band with drummer Jay Lane called Jay's Happy Sunshine Burger Joint www.jhsbj.net 2014 also marks 20 years for Sunshine being a member of the acappella vocal band out of Oakland, CA - SoVoSo - www.sovoso.com

Sunshine is a vocal performance coach and leading workshops and residencies focusing on using your voice as a musical instrument and as an instrument for positivity in the world. She is excited for the next chapter as Furthur takes a Hiatus for the rest of 2014, allowing time for her other musical dreams to materialize in the real, including her own band, Sunshine Garcia Band featuring Sunshine Becker.

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in partnership with our friends at

The Booksmith,

currently offering curbside pickup and in-person browsing

in their new location

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Free Admission!