Reading: Durrow & Matarazzo at UCI

UCI Author Series presents Heidi Durrow & Marisa Matarazzo at The UCI Bookstore

Tonight: Thursday, May 6th at 5PM

Heidi Durrow’s debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, is inspired by a real event that tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.

In a moving portrait of a young girl and society’s ideas of race, class, and beauty, Rachel learns to confront her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

Heidi Durrow has won the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, the Chapter One Fiction Contest, and the Rosh Endowment Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was also the 2008 Bellwether Prize winner for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. She is now the cofounder and coproducer of the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival.

In Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums­a blissful, absurd, sexy, and devastating collection of interconnected stories­promising new talent Marisa Matarazzo takes love to a whole new level and another world.

Two lovers accidentally create a love potion while making a batch of Jell–O, and their apartment is filled with water as an act of gravity–defying devotion to an acrobat. Falling into love, swimming, and drowning in it, Matarazzo’s characters often exist in places where land and water collide and morph.

Marisa Matarazzo holds an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship. At Yale, she received the Wallace Prize for fiction writing, the Arthur Willis Colton Scholarship, and was a two-time recipient of the Elmore A. Willets Prize for fiction.

Free and open to the public.

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