Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

An Afternoon with Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade

(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, $18)

Please note this is a free event! However, if you would like to make a contribution to support Books & Books' virtual events, we are grateful for any and all donations. Donations can be made in the upper righthand corner, above the "Save My Spot!" registration button. Thank you!

Telephone is, for me, a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This is a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from. --Hanif Abdurraqib

Miller and Wade's Telephone is a polyphonic emergency. These divinely nostalgic and politely oracular essays'--are they essays? watch them essai'--pursue the maximum boundaries of genre, and there, in the peripheries, together, we reach into our pockets to read their decoded message: I love. --Lily Hoang

Wade and Miller's collaborative essay collection, Telephone, stretches the possibilities of the form, creating a kind of thought puzzle that you're happy to never truly solve. Their voices bounce and blend, weave and bob, in a way that seems almost impossible and magical. Telephone is a testament to the power of voice and the beauty of collaborative art. --Steven Church

Telephone is unusual, thoughtful and compelling. The two voices together are clever, passionate, entertaining and intriguing. Telephone pushes the boundaries and demonstrates the power and potential of the creative nonfiction genre. --Lee Gutkind

Miller and Wade's marvelous Telephone takes the ordinary--cars, exercise, toys, sex--and elevates it to the extraordinary. Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation. Telephone stuns us with its burnished music, its use of form, and its brilliant musings on seemingly quotidian subjects. In these twin-voiced essays is a celebration of narrative's thrall, but also a liberation blueprint that frees us from the tyranny of a single self, a single story. --James Allen Hall

Brenda Miller’s most recent book, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing on Form, was published by University of Michigan Press in July 2021. Her book of collaborative essays with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, is forthcoming from CSU Poetry Center in Fall 2021. She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her poetry chapbook, The Daughters of Elderly Women, received the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Brenda’s work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and Associate Faculty with the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.

Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus and makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats.

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Telephone: An Afternoon with Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade