Join us on February 9, 7 p.m. EST, where I’ll be in conversation with Michele Morano about her wonderful collection, Like Love.

https://www.literatibookstore.com/event/home-literati-michele-morano-natalie-bakopoulous

AT HOME WITH LITERATI: MICHELE MORANO & NATALIE BAKOPOULOUS

We're pleased to welcome Michele Morano in support of Like Love. She'll be in conversation with author Natalie Bakopoulos.

Click here to join the webinar event on 2/9.

Note: we are now hosting on Zoom webinars. You will be prompted to enter a first name and email upon joining. You may then see a window reading "waiting for host to start webinar," but sit tight--you will be admitted as soon as we begin broadcasting live! You will be able to submit questions using the Q&A feature.

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About the book: Crushes. Infatuations. Attractions. Unexpected, inexplicable allure. Entanglements steeped in taboo and disruption. In Like Love , nothing is off limits.

In these remarkable essays, Michele Morano explores the pleasures, possibilities, strangeness, and lessons of unconsummated romance. With insight and imagination, Like Love interweaves poignant, humorous episodes from adulthood with the backstory of a young family's turbulent breakup. When Morano was an adolescent in blue-collar Poughkeepsie, New York, her mother left her father for a woman in an era when LGBTQ parents were widely viewed as "unfit." Through the turmoil, adolescent Morano paid attention, tucking away the stories that were shaping her and guiding her understanding of love.

Turning romantic clichés inside out and challenging us to rethink our notions about what it means to love, Like Love tells hard and necessary truths about the importance of desire in growing, traveling, mourning, parenting, and figuring out who you are in the world. With precision and depth, Morano explores what it means to find ourselves in relationships that are not quite-but almost-like love.

Michele Morano is the author of the travel memoir Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Essays, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women. She lives in Chicago, where she chairs the English Department at DePaul University.

Natalie Bakopoulos ‘s new novel, Scorpionfish, was published by Tin House in Juiy 2020. She’s also the author of The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and her work has appeared in Tin House, the Iowa Review, the New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, and The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories. She's an assistant professor of creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit and a faculty member of the summer program Writing Workshops in Greece. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Event date:

Tuesday, February 9, 2021 - 7:00pm

Event address:

Live on your device

Join me and my dear pal Elizabeth Ames on Wednesday, August 5, 8 p.m. ET/ 7 p.m. CT, in conversation! Hosted by Chicago’s new Madison Street Books.

https://madstreetbooks.com/?q=h.calevents

In Conversation with Alexander Chee, Hosted by Books & Books, 7 p.m. EDT, via Crowdcast. More information on how to register here!

SMALL COUNTRIES IN BIG LITERATURES

Natalie Bakopoulos and Kapka Kassabova in conversation with Fiona McCrae.

Thursday, July 16, 2020

3:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (e.g. East Coast, US), 8:00 pm BST (e.g. UK, Ireland), 10:00 pm EET  (e.g. Eastern Europe).

.The event will be held on Zoom. Please RSVP here to receive access to the event.

Donation of $5 is optional. This reading and conversation is part of the series Small Countries in Big Literatures and is on the occasion of the forthcoming publications of Kassabova's To The Lake (Graywolf Press, 4 August, 2020) and Bakopoulos's Scorpionfish (Tin House, 7 July, 2020)

The Small Countries in Big Literatures series features Anglophone literature set elsewhere in the world and it is supported by New York State Council on the Arts.

Happy to be in conversation with my pal Stephanie Soileau, author of the brilliant debut collection of stories, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights. July 9, hosted by Women & Children First. 6 p.m. CDT/7 p.m. EDT.

Please join me and Courtney Maum in a Zoom conversation—part of Literati Booksellers “At Home with Literati” lineup. July 7, 2020, at 7 p.m.

With Eloisa Amezcua, Natalie Bakopoulos, Jessica Johnson, Maya Popa.

March 28, 2019, 6 p.m.

Tiny’s Coffee, 2031 NE Martin Luther KIng Blvd, Portland, Oregon

Reading with Jamaal May. 2 p.m. Room 10302 Maccabees.

Please join me at Literati Bookstore, where I'll be talking with novelist and critic Katie Kitamura about her new novel, A Separation.

Room 101, Washington Convention Center, Level One
Friday, February 10, 2017
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

With Joanna Eleftheriou, Brit Bennett, Natalie Bakopoulos, Kimberly Meyer, and Beth Peterson:

Panel description (from AWP): In the age of the 30-second news clip, too often places of crisis beyond our borders become oversimplified and stereotyped. In this roundtable panel, four writers practicing in a variety of genres and writing about diverse hot spots—Norway’s collapsing glaciers, bankrupt Greece, the Sinai Desert with ISIS in the north, the US with its racial injustice—will examine ways to harness the energy bred by news clips while navigating the preconceptions readers bring to our work.

Come to Literati Bookstore for a reading by Alexander Maksik from his new novel, Shelter in Place. He will be joined in conversation by Natalie Bakopoulos.

Literati Bookstore

124 E. Washington St.

Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Wayne State Humanities Center, Faculty/Administration Building 2339, February 2, 2016, at 12:30 p.m.

We have a cultural fixation with borders and boundaries: their crossings, their rigidity, and where they blur. How does this recent capturing of our cultural imagination manifest itself in contemporary literature, both in content and form? How do authors negotiate the boundary between the self who writes and the self who appears on the page? This talk will explore these questions, focusing primarily on the work of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante; examine literature whose form blurs boundaries, particularly the recently popularized phenomenon of autofiction; and discuss ways in which the concept of boundaries appears in the novelist’s own creative work, particularly her novel-in-progress, which is set in Athens, Greece. 

A public lecture sponsored by the The Modern Greek Program at The Ohio State University.

Natalie Bakopoulos, Lan Samantha Chang, Steven Schwartz, and Peter Turchi

Panel description, via AWP: "Every story, novel, and poem strikes a balance not just between what's included and what's omitted, but between what is known—by the characters, by the narrator, and by the writer—and what is unknown, even unknowable. Effective choices regarding inclusion and presentation can create productive tension and realistic complexity; less effective ones can result in vagueness, obscurity, and unhelpful opacity. This panel will discuss examples from longer and shorter works."

Listen to the podcast from this event here: