Thursday, May 14, 7:30 PM
An Evening with the One Story Literary Debutantes
Sponsored by The Author’s Guild
Featuring readings by award-winning debut authors Mia Alvar, Matthew Baker, Austin Bunn, Scott Cheshire, Diane Cook, Katie Coyle, Andrew Roe, Matt Sumell, Ted Thompson, and Anne Valente
Hosted by One Story founding editor Hannah Tinti
Reception to follow

One Story Magazine’s annual Literary Debutante Ball is a send-up of the debutante balls of old: instead of featuring young society ladies, it honors One Story authors who have published their first books in the past year. For the third year in a row, this year’s Debutantes will visit Greenlight to read from their debut books. Mia Alvar’s story collection In the Country is a powerful, globe-trotting debut full of vivid, character-driven stories about Filipinos from every walk of life. Smugglers caves, graveyards, ghost houses, and maps come together in an intriguing mystery as eleven-year-old mathematical and musical genius Nicholas tries to save the family's home in Matthew Baker’s YA novel If You Find This. Brimming with life and extraordinary range, Austin Bunn's dazzling story collection The Brink explores what happens at "the end" and afterward. Called "powerful and unflinching" by Column McCann, Scott Cheshire's debut novel High as the Horses’ Bridles is a "great new American epic" (Philipp Meyer) about a father and son finding their way back to each other. Diane Cook’s Man V. Nature is a refreshingly imaginative, daring debut collection of stories that illuminates with audacious wit the complexity of human behavior, and the veneer of civilization over our darkest urges. Katie Coyle’s young adult novel Vivian Apple at the End of the World is the story of a seventeen-year-old on a cross-country roadtrip through a paranoid and panic-stricken America, looking for answers after the supposed rapture. In the story of a comatose girl who develops a reputation for miracles, Andrew Roe’s acclaimed novel The Miracle Girl tells a larger story about the human yearning for something to believe in. Hailed as "indelible" in Entertainment Weekly’s list of "20 Books We'll Read in 2015," Matt Sumell’s Making Nice is a gut-punch of a novel about love, grief, and family. Set in the affluent, morally strict hamlets of Connecticut, Ted Thompson's novel The Land of Steady Habits finely observes a man in deep conflict with his community. From ghosts to pink dolphins to a fight club of young women who practice beneath the Alaskan aurora borealis, the stories in Anne Valente’s collection By Light We Knew Our Names examine the beauty and heartbreak of the world we live in, exploring the thin border between magic and grief. Greenlight is proud to host some of the best emerging writers currently at work in American letters for this festive occasion!