Leah Bailly

Beyond excited! Thank you to Samantha Haywood, Evan Oakes and Jen Sookfong Lee for bringing this book into the world. March 2027, LFG.

Thank you to Joya: AiR located in Velez Blanco, Spain, for the beautiful week of residency to work on my novel late 2024. It was a warm and inviting space for me to rewrite a project from long ago. Returning to Spain was a gift, and I am so grateful to Joya: Air, the volunteers, artists and artists who have run this space for over 20 years. Gracias!

#artistresidency#artistresidence#galianoisland#natureinspired

https://www.craftliterary.com/craft-first-chapters-contest-2022/

Happy to have a new essay up at the LA Review of books blog. After a prominent university asked me to write an essay about happiness, I wrote a piece about all the factors that kids need to be happy. I included the fact that we need safe doctors, and the story was killed! So pleased LA Review of books gave it a new home.

Eng 103 Capilano University English Introduction to Literature (Leah Bailly)
Defining Our Era 
Rather than look backwards, as so many introduction courses do, this class will look at the most contemporary work we can find—published between 2010 and 2020—to ask larger societal questions about in our current period of literature. Who are today’s poets, story writers, and essayists? How are they recording the narrative of this era? What forms does it take? Together, we will examine how literature reaches us and represents us. We will read diverse voices, find new experiments in hybrid forms, explore many unique points of view, and discuss how the words look on the page. Writers like Morgan Parker, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Abdurraqib, Natalie Diaz and Seo-Young Chu will help us to define to our distinct experiences of the contemporary world.

-best friend from high school’s mom

How does the global village tell stories? How does the digital age change our thinking and our writing? Thanks to the internet, we are now used to events being broadcast instantly and simultaneously. Plural voices report on every issue, and text is always accompanied by video, sound and image. As we delve further into the digital age, we are increasingly comfortable with hyperlinks and hybrid forms and multiple narrators infiltrating our narration. But do we forsake a certain intimacy in our literature? Are we growing accustomed to the isolation of constant connectivity? This seminar examines what we gain and lose by writing in a networked society, and how these new forms appear on the page and screen.

Crystal Hut 🌞 (at Crystal Hut) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsCCC_2H-XA_6enveevlLCWjo0DDQnL4Qd8ZFM0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1hmxibm4cbav1

So grateful to Literary Affairs in Los Angeles for inviting me to moderate a panel at the Beverly Hills Literary Escape. Best quote, Joan Silber: “Raise your hand if you’ve never done something stupid for love.” None of us did. 💗

From Natalie Diaz via Twitter: @NatalieGDiaz

Very stoked to be heading to the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing next spring for their conference as a Teaching Fellow. Some desert time next Feb, we’ll be at Arizona State.

Sunshine Coast

How many ways can teenage girl-lives intertwine and break away. Julie and Celine are white teens in New Mexico, they are actors, misfits, try-hards. Their teen lives can feel deadly serious and also feel light and perfect: crushes and parents and lipsticks and joints and blowjobs and school plays and laugh-attack-nonsense. It can also be about the murdered girls around us, the disappeared, the never-come-backs. The text is always reminding us of what is at stake, the violence done to women in the margins in cities like Jaurez and Vancouver, and how that kind of violence looms in the background for every girl. It is girlhood, adulthood, a book on the cusp. Brilliant and breathtaking, #book*hug seems to have an amazing eye for the unconventional novel

Maternity leave, trip to Bali Indonesia, move to Canada-- it’s been a wonderful winter and spring. I’m so happy to be back to writing after eight months away with baby and fam. xox