Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national bestseller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press 2017 / Picador 2018) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). A winner of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, she is the author of nine books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, including the novel O, Democracy!, the novel in poems Robinson Alone, based on the life and work of Weldon Kees, the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs and the art modeling memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object. Her first book is Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, and her first poetry collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion) won the 2007 Gatewood Prize from the feminist publisher Switchback Books. With Elisa Gabbert, she is the co-author of the poetry collection That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness and the chapbook The Kind of Beauty That Has Nowhere to Go. And with fellow DePaul professor Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The New York Times Book Review, BITCH, Allure, The Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.

Xe Sands is an award-winning narrator known for her authentic characterisations and intimate delivery. She has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance and visual art, including recordings of Wonderland by Stacey D'Erasmo, The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro and Survival Lessons by Alice Hoffman. Sands has also been recognised for her engaging romance narrations and was named Most Impressive Narrator Discovery for titles such as Catch of the Day by Kristan Higgins and On Thin Ice by Anne Stuart.