BLR BookTalk: Venita Blackburn with Suzanne McConnell
Thu Mar 27, 2025 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM EDT
Online, YouTube
Description
ABOUT THE EVENT:
BLR BookTalks bring together writers and editors for wide-ranging conversations about craft, creativity, and life. Our latest BookTalk features Venita Blackburn and Suzanne McConnell, who first connected fourteen years ago when Suzanne edited Venita's story "String Theory," which appeared in BLR's 10th anniversary issue. In the years since, our editors have watched Venita's writing career take off with the publication of two prize-winning collections of short stories — Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl — and a debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California.
Join us on March 27 to hear more about Venita's novel, which has been called "the work of a gifted writer who understands love bonds, family, death and inevitability, but also has a sense of humor about all of the above." (Naomi Elias, KQED review)
(RSVP even if you can't make the exact time of the event. We'll send you an email the next day with the link, which will stay active afterward.)
READ:
Purchase Dead in Long Beach, California on BLR's Bookshop page and a portion of the purchase will support BLR.
Read Venita's BLR story, "String Theory," from Issue 21.
Learn more about BLR and find copies of the journal at BLReview.org.
BIOS: Venita Blackburn & Suzanne McConnell
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the NYTimes, New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among others. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, published January of 2024 and is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno. https://venitablackburn.com
Suzanne McConnell is the co-author, along with Kurt Vonnegut, of Pity The Reader: On Writing with Style. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her stories, essays, and poems have appeared and won prizes in many publications. She taught writing and literature at Hunter College for thirty years and was the Fiction Editor at Bellevue Literary Review for eighteen years, where she now serves as a contributing Fiction Editor. https://www.suzannemcconnell.com
PRAISE for Dead in Long Beach, California
“Intensity and experimentation have definitely survived the transition to long-form writing — along with Blackburn’s exquisite sentences, which burst with heartbreak, rivalries and machinations.”- Carolina A. Miranda, Los AngelesTimes
“Venita Blackburn’s prose is stunning, sensitive and that-made-me-snort funny. Richly layered and ambitiously structured, this unconventional novel about death and denial is bizarre in the best way.” – Lucy Tu, Scientific American