Avitus B. Carle presents her award-winning debut flash fiction collection, These Worn Bodies, joined by poet Alison Lubar. To reserve copies of either author’s books for this event, please email or call the store.

In this richly imagined and unconventionally told debut collection, Avitus B. Carle turns tradition on its head, discarding and reframing antiquated portraits of women and girls as damsels, princesses, and homemakers relegated to lives of cleaning and baking and waiting in towers to be rescued or to receive a truly forced first kiss. Instead, Carle’s characters face the world head-on in unique, bold, and unexpected ways.

Within the pages of These Worn Bodies, Carle depicts a woman at odds with her cardboard cutout husband, a mouse who forms an unlikely alliance with a human over a knife, the consequences of an obsession gone too far over a gerbil named Gertrude Stein, what happens when a group of girls gather to fire bullets from their mouths or when a character clashes with her author.

Carle’s menagerie of characters tell their stories through paragraphs, letters, resumes, and even in the form of a puzzle. But no matter the shape each story takes, the entire cast shares a common goal: to shed the worn expectations inflicted upon their bodies.

Alison Lubar’s METAMOURPHOSIS contemplates the transformative power of particularly queer, sapphic love, in all of its expressions: through grief, new relationship energy, and non-linear healing. The section titles are portmanteaus, playing on both the idea of evolution, and of the illusion of a binary. And while these smaller divisions are worlds in themselves, their cohesive unfolding implies the interconnectedness of all facets, stages, and nuances of love.

Avitus B(uckhaulter) Carle (she/her) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her debut flash fiction collection, These Worn Bodies, was the winner of the 2023 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fractured Lit., X-R-A-Y Litmag, The Commuter (Electric Lit.), The Rumpus, Waxwing, JMWW, and Shondaland, among others.

Alison Lubar (they/them) teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, biracial femme whose life work has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices to young people. Their poetry collection, The Other Tree, was the recipient of Harbor Editions’ 2024 Laureate Prize, and is set to be published in September 2025. They’re the author of four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (CLASH!, 2023), and It Skips a Generation (Stanchion, 2023), as well as one full-length, METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024).