PSB: Boston Edition and GrubStreet are excited to welcome Tim Weed to celebrate the release of his novel, The Afterlife Project. Poet Charles Coe will join Weed in conversation. 

This event will take place on Thursday, June 5 at 7pm at PSB: Boston Edition (50 Liberty Drive, Boston, MA 02210).

This event is co-presented by GrubStreet and Porter Square Books

Separated by ten thousand years, a team of scientists and their test subject must work together to save the human species--before it's too late . . .

With humanity facing imminent extinction, Centauri Project scientists use technology originally designed for interstellar travel to send a test subject ten millennia into Earth's future. Marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, microbiologist Nicholas Hindman searches for evidence of remnant populations. He has a protocol to follow and is determined to do so to the bitter end--though he knows he's probably searching in vain, stranded on an empty planet silently orbiting the sun.

Meanwhile, back in 2068 AD, a devastating hyperpandemic has quelled all talk of interstellar travel and thrown the future of humanity into grave doubt. Four surviving members of the Centauri team board a vintage solar-powered sailing yacht for a harrowing journey in search of a second test subject. Their destination is a small volcanic island north of Sicily rumored to harbor that rarest of creatures: a woman capable of getting pregnant, thereby ensuring this generation of Homo sapiens isn't the last. But first they must make it halfway across the post-apocalyptic globe, risking heatwaves, oceanic megastorms, murderous gangs, deranged cult leaders, a volcanic eruption, and the dangerous microbes that continue to circulate through the planet's atmosphere.

A finalist for the Prism Prize for Climate Literature, The Afterlife Project encompasses a desperate quest for the key to the future of humanity, an impossible love story, and a search for meaning across the inconceivable vastness of geological time.

Tim Weed is the author of three books of fiction. His work has won or been shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Writer’s Digest Annual Fiction Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, the New Rivers Many Voices Project, and many others. The co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, Tim teaches at Grub Street and is on the core faculty of the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. His new novel, The Afterlife Project, has been a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Literature and Uncharted magazine’s Novel Excerpt Award.

Charles Coe is the author of four books of poetry: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents, Picnic on the Moon, Memento Mori, and Purgatory Road, all published by Leapfrog Press. Charles Coe: New and Selected Works will be published by Leapfrog in the summer of 2024. He is also author of 2014’s Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media that tells the story of a homeless man surviving on the streets of Boston.

Charles was a 2017 artist-in-residence for the city of Boston, where he created an oral history project focused on residents of Mission Hill. He has been chosen as a “Literary Light” by the Associates of the Boston Public Library. He is an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, and at Bay Path University, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where he teaches in both MFA writing programs. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union that serves freelance writers.

Tim Weed, author of The Afterlife Project, in conversation with Charles Coe