Orion Magazine and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination present a conversation between two leading authors of speculative writing—Victor LaValle and Carmen Maria Machado—to celebrate the launch of Orion’s most recent anthology, Unnatural Disasters.
Unnatural Disasters collects the scariest stories published in the pages of Orion. Featuring work by writers including Amy Irvine, Carmen Maria Machado, and Joe Wilkins, and a foreword by Victor LaValle, these tales of enchantment, danger, and survival give a chilling glimpse into nature’s dark side.
Please join us on Wednesday, October 2, 2024, at 11:00 am Eastern, 8:00 am Pacific and Arizona time.
The event will be moderated by Orion editor-at-large and Unnatural Disasters co-editor Christopher Cox.
Speakers
Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, five novels, including The Ecstatic and Big Machine, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books, Victor LaValle’s Destroyer and Eve. In 2023, his novel The Changeling was adapted into a series starring LaKeith Stanfield for Apple TV+. He has been the winner of the World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, and Shirley Jackson Award.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and the Lambda Literary Awards for Lesbian Fiction and LGBTQ Nonfiction. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere.
Christopher Cox is the co-editor of Unnatural Disasters and editor-at-large at Orion Magazine. He is the former editor of Harper’s Magazine and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. Work that he has edited has won the National Magazine Award, the PEN Literary Award for Journalism, an Overseas Press Club award, and has been included in several Best American collections.