We're welcoming Spring this Tuesday with our amazing April lineup
And a very sincere thank you for an amazing AWP off-site reading ♥️
Hello dear memoir lovers,
Can I just say wow? It’s been over a week since our AWP event, and although it’s taken me about that long to recover (both mentally and physically) I am still in awe at how many of you came out to support our little night of nonfiction ♥️
The Love Song Bar was completely packed and all I can manage to get out right now about the lineup was that it was so perfect. I was already a fan of each writer but their readings that night made me appreciate and respect each of their work so much more.
But without a doubt, the highlight for me was the audience, who just brought so much amazing and supportive energy to the room. It felt like everyone was connected in some way and I just can’t explain how extremely grateful I am to each and every person in attendance.
I can also say without a doubt that we are so excited and eager to do this again at next year’s AWP conference in Baltimore!
In the meantime, we are back to our monthly NYC event and have arrived home from Los Angeles with more excitement about Must Love Memoir than ever. Not only as we approach the 2 year anniversary in just a few months but especially as we welcome Spring with this incredible March lineup!
You will finds us back at Jake’s Dilemma this Tuesday night, April 8, at 7:30pm with another night of nonfiction. You can read all about the readers below and find us in the usual place (downstairs in the Oak Cellar Room). We hope to see you there!
♥️,
Krystal (and Hope)
March 2025
Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, public art, and parenthood. Her books are Lessons for Survival, shortlisted for a Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and an Anisfield-Wolf Award, Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor’s Daughter. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s distinctions include the Climate Narratives Prize, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Yaddo. She serves as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a professor in the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York (CUNY). She lives with her family in the Bronx.
Vesna Jaksic Lowe is a former award-winning journalist who now focuses on creative nonfiction. She runs the Immigrant Strong newsletter and has taught workshops on writing about the immigrant experience. Her bylines include three books (Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, and the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024 and 2023), as well as The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Catapult, and Pigeon Pages. She is an alumna of Hedgebrook, the Kenyon Review Writing Workshop, Tin House, and Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, from which she received Parent-Writer and Poet-Author fellowships.
Alexandra Chan is an archaeologist, an award-winning author, and artist, who, in addition to her most recent memoir, In the Garden Behind the Moon, has written extensively about the archaeology of northern slavery, and questions of race, place, identity, and becoming. She continues to be an avid traveler and collector of “lucky nuts,” and to walk, garden, paint, write, stitch, build, and dream herself into every gentler and more creative ways of being alive and human, searching for beauty and meaning in unusual places, telling stories along the way. She lives with her husband, her two sons, and their menagerie of animals in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Kristine Esser Slentz is a queer writer of Maltese descent, raised in the Chicagoland area. A cult escapee and GED holder, she is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and the forthcoming collection face-to-faces (ThirtyWest Publishing House, 2026). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, Five Points, TEDx, and elsewhere. KRISTINE is the co-founder, organizer, and host of Adverse Abstraction, a monthly experimental artist series in New York City’s East Village. She also produces and performs in Verse & Vision, a stage production currently in a micro-residency at NYC’s Dada and headed for an upcoming run at the IndyFringe Festival. Follow her art on Substack at Carnations & Car Crashes.
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. Her work has appeared in Everyday Health.
Florence Wetzel was born 1962 in Brooklyn, NY. She writes in different genres, including her release Sara My Sara: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss, which was published in July 2024. Her novels include the thriller The Woman Who Went Overboard and the Swedish mystery The Grand Man. She has also authored horror short stories, a book of poems and memoir essays, and co-authored jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson's autobiography. Her latest book is Dashiki: A Cozy Mystery.
