Due to health reasons, this reading has been cancelled.
Bryan Washington will read from his new novel Palaver, followed by an on-stage conversation led by acclaimed ABC-13 News journalist Melanie Lawson. The evening will conclude with a book sale, led by Kindred Stories, and a book signing. The event is presented as part of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
A native of Houston, Texas, Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, Ernest J. Gaines Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and an O. Henry Prize, and has been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Aspen Words Literary Prize, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, his writing has also appeared in Granta, Time, GQ, and Esquire, among other places.
Now based in Tokyo, Japan, Washington returns to his hometown to share his new novel Palaver, about an expat son living in Japan and his estranged mother who turns up on his doorstep. Both mother and son try the best they can to define where “home” really is, and whether they can find it in each other. Rachel Khong writes of the novel, it’s “…funny and sad and honest all at once—awake to the mundane miracles of our lives.” Ocean Vuong says, “Palaver is the pinnacle of what has become Washington’s classic approach to writing: care, humor, tenderness, and an embrace of human beings at their most vulnerable, lovely, and wounded.… Fiction – no – life is better because Bryan is writing.”
ABC-13 News journalist MELANIE LAWSON has won numerous awards for her reporting, including three Emmys. She is well-known for her in-depth interviews with a wide range of notables, including three U.S. Presidents, Henry Kissinger, the Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, Destiny’s Child, Spike Lee, and Denzel Washington. For the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series she has conducted several thoughtful interviews with Brit Bennett, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James McBride, Leila Mottley, and Annette Gordon-Reed.
