Join us in celebration of Lysley Tenorio‘s Monstress, a dazzling debut short-story collection featuring lepers, healers, and celebrities going incognito. Monstress alternates between the Philippines and San Francisco, where we encounter a Filipino B-movie horror actress from the 1960s striving for chance at stardom, a transgender sibling’s revelation at his father’s funeral, and former fans in Manila conspiring to murder The Beatles. In Monstress, identity is a constant experiment in performance, an elaborate masquerade that unveils monstrous personas like “Bat-Winged Pygmy Queen” and the half-Korean boy with mutant abilities. Prepare to be whisked away into Tenorio’s hall of mirrors, where the grotesque, simulated, and beautiful duke it out in dragalicious role-play.

Tenorio is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Award, an NEA fellowship, and the Whiting Writer’s Award. Make sure to check out Tenorio’s spicy interview with the Paris Review.

Lysley Tenorio‘s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A Whiting Writer’s Award winner and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born during an earthquake in Olongapo City, Philippines, he currently lives in San Francisco, and is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Nita Noveno was born and raised in Southeast Alaska. A graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program in Creative Nonfiction, she is the the founder and co-host of Sunday Salon (www.sundaysalon.com), a monthly prose reading series in its ninth year in NYC. She teaches English Composition at LaGuardia Community College and lives in Astoria, Queens. Her essay, “A Bird’s Life,” about her mother of re-invention, will be published in the May issue of Kweli Journal.