Join us for an evening with Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, who will read from her debut short story collection, Marvelous Freaks of Nature! A conversation with Christina Ward-Niven will follow. This in-person event will be cosponsored by WriterHouse and will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: An amateur herpetologist gets swindled by women he meets on lizard-care message boards, a dental hygienist takes a doomed trip to see a sham psychic on the Atlantic City boardwalk, a gruesome gag gift becomes the subject of morbid fascination for a grieving woman who can’t stop sleeping with her roommate’s boyfriend. With surgical focus and an infectious dark humor, Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s stories probe a vein of longing and estrangement. From oddballs and lonely hearts living on the fringes of suburbia to stunning abnormalities pulled out from Mother Nature’s bag of tricks, Marvelous Freaks of Nature! is a delightfully sly study of the shadowy crannies of the human heart. A dazzling debut so full of life it hurts.
About the Author: Alyson Mosquera Dutemple is the author of the short story collection Marvelous Freaks of Nature! Her work has appeared in more than four dozen journals and anthologies including Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, DIAGRAM, Passages North, Redivider, Arts & Letters, Best Microfiction, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Alyson has received support from Millay Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, where she was a 2024 recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship. Find her at alysondutemple.com and at alysonmosqueradutemple.substack.com.
About the Moderator: Christina Ward-Niven is a writer, editor, and creative writing instructor. Her recent work has appeared in Husk Zine, The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Writers Review, CRAFT Literary, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of William & Mary, and she also holds an MA in journalism from Boston University and an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers. Since 2018, she has led fiction and nonfiction workshops at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia.
