This is a Bookend Event of the 2024 Twin Cities Book Festival.

Everything in Edith’s life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead. STILL LIFE volleys between the present and recent past: Edith was a bumbling college “boy,” pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to fledgling adulthood’s musical backdrop. Now, Edith is wracked with guilt over Val. A sometimes-lover, trans mentor, purveyor of estrogen pills and wisdom from a life on the fringe, Val was everything Tessa wasn’t and everything Edith needed. Was Valerie’s fatal car crash Edith’s fault? Would she have stayed put if Edith had loved her better?

Katherine Packert Burke is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in San Diego and the MFA program at the University of Alabama. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Their work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity, Zoeglossia, The Ragdale Foundation and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She is the author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, CLMP Firecracker Award, and winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.