Experience an evening of powerful storytelling with Marcela Fuentes and Eileen G’Sell, as they co-headline a thought-provoking discussion on identity, culture, and resilience. Fuentes presents her debut novel Malas, a mesmerizing Good Morning America Book Club pick, centered on family curses, Tejano culture, and fierce women navigating life along the Texas-Mexico border. Joining her is G’Sell with Francofilaments, a collection delving into Francophilia, feminism, and cinematic allure. Together, they bring forth unique perspectives on womanhood, heritage, and the transformative power of art in their unforgettable works.

Marcela Fuentes is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and essayist. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was the 2016-2017 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Texas Highways Magazine, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Her work has been anthologized in New Stories from the Southwest, Best of the Web, and Flash Fiction International. Her story, “The Observable World” was included in the Pushcart Prizes XLVII : Best of the Small Presses 2023 Edition. She was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas. Her debut novel MALAS was published from Viking Books in June 2024.

Eileen G’Sell is a poet and critic with recent contributions to Poetry, Jacobin, The Baffler, Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2023, she received the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism. Her second volume of poetry, Francofilaments, comes out in 2024 from Broken Sleep Books. In 2025, her first book of nonfiction, Lipstick, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic’s Object Lessons Series. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.