March Reading Events: Double the Fun

The full lineup for this month's NYC reading, PLUS a very special off-site event at AWP Los Angeles!

People say you never forget your first — a cliché I never understood. I’ve forgotten so many firsts — the first time I rode a bike, the first time I swam without assistance. Even my first kiss during a sixth grade game of Spin the Bottle is fuzzy. I don’t remember the boy’s name or even what he looked like. I couldn’t tell you, with a hundred percent accuracy, when my first period was.

But I do remember my first AWP off-site reading.

It was a Wednesday evening back in March 2022 — the night before panels and discussions officially started. I took the train into Philadelphia early, heading to the convention center and collecting my conference pass so early you could still see the vacuum lines on the convention center’s carpet. I was like a college freshman showing up to campus hours before my first class, so giddy and eager and nervous to be there. To be a part of a real writer’s something.

That first night, I squeezed into a local bookstore for a standing room only event and heard

Lilly Dancyger

read from her debut memoir, Negative Space. The excerpt she shared was about going through her deceased father’s notebooks many years after he passed away. She read about expectations and disappointments and revelations, and the many ways grief weaves itself into all of those things.

I stood, listening to the story of a young woman who had changed and altered so much since the death of her father, and she was afraid of what it meant to be turning into a person he would never know. I saw so many parallels to my own story, and I was almost in shock that a book like hers existed. It felt like she was speaking right to me — and that evening I learned about the magic that exists at live readings.

It was from that night, and many other reading events that the first seeds for Must Love Memoir were planted. When I began this series, I knew I wanted to eventually bring it to AWP and spotlight some of the amazing nonfiction writers that attend the conference each year. Maybe I could even help deliver that same magical moment to another attendee.

This year’s AWP conference is taking place in Los Angeles at the end of the month and the inaugural Must Love Memoir off-site reading is officially happening. It’s an extra special moment for me because I was born and raised in Southern California, and the idea of hosting my first AWP event back home truly feels like a dream.

On top of that, Hope and I put together a very exciting lineup with so many incredible memoirists sharing their work. And it feels extra special that Lilly Dancyger, who wrote and signed the very first book I ever purchased at an AWP event, will be a part of it.

Most importantly, this year’s conference is taking place very soon after wildfires tore through so much of Los Angeles. It was heartbreaking to see my home state terrorized by the growing impacts of climate change and to watch so many people lose everything. With that in mind, all proceeds after meeting costs will be donated to help support victims of the recent LA fires.

We really hope to see you there. Tickets are available at this link.

♥️,

Krystal (and Hope)

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ABOUT OUR REGULAR NYC READING EVENT:

Due to a venue conflict, there has been a date change for this month’s reading. It will now be taking place Monday, March 10 at 7:30pm at Jake’s Dilemma. You can check out the full lineup and bios below.

We hope to see you there!

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March Readers

Sarah Gormley is a writer and art gallery owner in Columbus, Ohio. Her debut memoir The Order of Things came out in September 2024.

Toby James Millstein was born and raised in Downtown Brooklyn. He attended Brooklyn College where he studied Creative Writing and received his BFA. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at CCNY, where he is also an Adjunct Lecturer. His work deals with family, sex, desire, consciousness, disease, relationships, and the body. His chosen genres are autoficiton, memoir, metafiction, surrealism, and magical realism.

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New Jersey-based writer. She is the editor of personal essay magazine Open Secrets and over 70 anthologies, author of craft guide How to Write Erotica and short story collection Lap Dance Lust, and has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Village Voice, Salon and other publications.

Krystal Marie Orwig is a writer, editor, and cat mom to an orange cuddly guy who moonlights as a hairdresser. She is the founder and co-host of Must Love Memoir, a New York City reading series dedicated to nonfiction writers. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York where she also teaches English Composition and undergraduate Creative Writing. In her free time she’s usually rewatching Gilmore Girls and Friends or finding places to store toilet paper in her New York apartment. Her work has appeared in Everyday Health.

Jenny Higgins is a mother, friend, wife, writer, reader, and a professional jack of all trades.

Charles Bock is the author of the new memoir, I WILL DO BETTER, as well as the novels Alice & Oliver and Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, People, The Believer, Vice, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Writer’s Digest, and in numerous anthologies. Charles teaches at NYU and lives with his daughter in Manhattan.

Reminder:

The lovely Rachel Kramer Bussel over at Open Secrets (and one of our March readers!) is hosting an incredible one-day summit in NYC on May 3 with over 40 speakers including, memoir authors, storytellers and editors. You can see the full list of speakers here, with some very exciting Must Love Memoir alum on the roster! A limited amount of tickets are available through Eventbrite.

The event is sponsored by Narratively and Libro.fm.