Left Bank Books presents Jess Bowers and Travis Mossotti - Horse Show & Apocryphal Genesis

Left Bank Books presents Jess Bowers and Travis Mossotti to celebrate both of their new books!

Jess Bowers is an award-winning and highly-acclaimed short fiction author and Associate Professor of English at Maryville University. Join us as we celebrate her debut collection Horse Show!

Travis Mossotti is an award winning poet and serves as a Biodiversity Fellow in the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University. Join us to celebrate the release of his collection Apocryphal Genesis!

Bowers and Mossotti will personalize and sign copies after the presentation! Personalized and signed copies will be available to be mailed anywhere in the country. For personalized copies, please order before noon on May 2nd.

About the Authors
Jess Bowers lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she works as an Associate Professor of English at Maryville University. But she’s originally from York, Pennsylvania, which was the first capital of the United States (so they claim) and hometown of the 90s rock band Live (that one’s true).

Her short fiction has appeared in The Portland Review, cream city review, Redivider, StoryQuarterly, The Indiana Review, Zone 3, Oyez Review, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Award, and other honors. She won Laurel Review‘s Midwest Short Fiction Prize and the Winter Anthology Prize.

She’s also a co-editor for Cartridge Lit, an online journal publishing literature about video games, which she’s loved since she first played Fishing Derby on her Atari 2600.

Bowers holds a B.A. in English and creative writing from Goucher College, an M.A. in the same from Hollins University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri, where she studied fiction writing, film, and 19th-century literature and visual culture.

In her free time, she thinks about the hungry ghosts of silent Hollywood while riding her little yellow pony through the woods. She also watches far too much T.V.



Travis Mossotti's previous collections are About the Dead, Field Study, Narcissus Americana, and Racecar Jesus. He's been the recipient of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the May Swenson Book Award, the Christopher Smart - Joan Alice Poetry Prize, the Alma Book Award, and others. Mossotti currently serves as a Biodiversity Fellow in the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University. He lives and works in St. Louis.



About Horse Show
From the tale of Lady, the mare who read a Duke University psychologist's mind, to television palomino Mr. Ed's hypnotic hold over Wilbur Post, the thirteen tales in Horse Show explore how humans have used, abused, and spectacularized their equine companions throughout American history. Wrestling with themes of obsolescence, grief, and nostalgia, Bowers guides us through her museum of equine esoterica with arresting imagery, unflinching intensity, and dark humor.

"If Steven Millhauser wrote a book about horses, he might have written something a little bit like Jess Bowers' fascinating short story collection Horse Show. It's meticulous, lovely, strange, and both utterly engrossing and also completely not what I'd expected when I opened up a book of horse stories." -Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You (Stories and Other Revenges)

About Apocryphal Genesis
Apocryphal Genesis comes as a reminder of how deeply personal an impersonal world can often feel. The failed promises of the previous centuries are mere preamble to the predicaments of the current one. Humanity's contentment to entertain the illusion of control over the world around us is also the source of our collective discontent. In Mossotti's poems, dark humor underpins every turn. His wit cuts through the bang and blab of what passes for polite discourse, and his visions are jarring and delightful in equal measure. His poems cinematically zoom from the exceedingly distant vantages of " telescopes scraping deeper into the womb / of the universe" to the microscopic " space between the whirl of electrons." While the ghost of Apollinaire guides the reader through these haunting poems, it's the poet himself who's on display more often than not (like a moth pinned inside a glass case), naked and unadorned. Apocryphal Genesis is a book that's mature enough to be unimpressed with the trappings of maturity. It's the first glance the poet's after, subtle movement of stirrings under the leaf litter, and page after page, Mossotti transforms the cosmically divine into something indelible.