We are absolutely thrilled to be welcoming Rivers Solomon for a virtual event to celebrate the arrival of faer hugely anticipated third novel, SORROWLAND. Rivers will be joined in conversation by writer and artist Ama Josephine Budge.

Vern, a Black woman with albinism, is hunted after escaping a religious compound, then she discovers that her body is changing and that she is developing extra-sensory powers.

Alone in the woods, she gives birth to twins and raises them away from the influence of the outside world. But something is wrong – not with them, but with her own body. It’s itching, it’s stronger, it’s… not normal.

To understand her body’s metamorphosis, Vern must investigate not just the secluded religious compound she fled but the violent history of dehumanisation, medical experimentation, and genocide that produced it. In the course of reclaiming her own darkness, Vern learns that monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire histories, systems, and nations.

Rivers Solomon is an anarchist, a dyke, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Fae write about life in the margins, where they are much at home.

In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, Solomon’s debut novel AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hurston/Wright, a Tiptree, and a Locus Award, among others. Solomon’s second book, THE DEEP, based on the Hugo-nominated song of the same name by experimental hip-hop group clipping, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and is on the shortlist for a Nebula, Locus, and Hugo award.

Solomon’s short work appears in or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Guernica, Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. Fae live in the UK.

Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Ama’s speculative fiction and essays have been commissioned and published internationally, including by Anathema Spec from the Margins, the Architectural Review, the Feminist Review, Aperture, Whitechapel Gallery and more. Ama was nominated for the 2021 Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award, and is working on her first novella a speculative meditation on trees, queer erotics and isolation.
Ama is the recipient of the 2020 Local, International and Planetary Fictions Fellowship with Curatorial Frame (Helsinki) and EVA International (Limerick), and will be researching the topic Pleasurable Ecologies – Formations of Care: Curation as Future-building. Ama is also a member of Queer Ecologies, initiator of the Apocalypse Reading Room project and a recipient of 2020 Bernie Grant Micro commission funding.