Boston Book Festival

SPARK: Reading Series.
Grief, love, death, living: The writers in this session take these existential topics and grapple with them in exciting new ways. K. Iver’s debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco, winner of the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an elegiac tribute to a first love lost. “Framed by grief and longing, the poet's vivid and eclectic imagination sprawls through each poem." (Tyehimba Jess) Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil centers on the modern Brazilian-American immigrant experience and is suffused with the ambition, loss, and longing that are specific to that experience as well as universal. “This is a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction" (NY Times). National Book Award finalist Joan Wickersham’s novel in verse, No Ship Sets Out To Be a Shipwreck, weaves a profound, personal story of loss from an encounter with an unsettling artifact: the sunken seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which lay undiscovered for three hundred years, and now sits in a museum exhibit dedicated to its failed journey. This session will be moderated by Dawn Tripp, bestselling author of Jackie and Georgia.