The Oxford American is proud to conclude its 2019-2020 South Words readers series with Leesa Cross Smith, author of So We Can Glow: Stories. Moderating the discussion is OA contributor and author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, Kevin Brockmeier. Doors open at 6:00 PM, and there will be a book signing after the reading. Books will be for sale onsite.

This special event is free and open to the public.

Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and writer from Kentucky. She is the author of Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018) and Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014) and the forthcoming short story collection So We Can Glow (Grand Central Publishing, 2020) and the forthcoming novel This Close To Okay (Grand Central Publishing, 2021.) Every Kiss a War was a finalist for both the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (2012) and the Iowa Short Fiction Award (2012). Her short story “Whiskey & Ribbons” won Editor’s Choice in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest (2011) and was listed as a notable story for South‘s Million Writers Award. The novel Whiskey & Ribbons was longlisted for the 2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and listed among Oprah Magazine’s “Top Books of Summer.” She was a consulting editor for Best Small Fictions 2017. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Best Small Fictions 2015, NYLON, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Little Fiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Longform Fiction, Carve Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Paper Darts, Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Gigantic Sequins, Folio, American Short Fiction (online), Midwestern Gothic, Juked, Word Riot, and many others. She and her husband Loran run a literary magazine called WhiskeyPaper.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of three novels, two story collections, two children's novels, and a memoir. His next book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, is forthcoming in 2020. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.