An event presented by The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College, an annual festival that focuses on women’s leadership onscreen. 

This year the festival launched a new collaboration, the Abortion Pipeline Project, in partnership with Jess Jacobs, Renee Bracey Sherman and Gretchen Sisson to source scripts that center abortion.

Telling Abortion Stories Through Film and Television is a conversation with Erika Green Swofford and Merritt Tierce, moderated by Jess Jacobs, for participants of the Abortion Pipeline Project.

5pm – 6pm: OPEN STAGE: readings about Body, Friendship, Love (in English, French, Spanish)

6:30pm – 8pm: CONVERSATION: Join us for an exclusive evening as we host French writer Colombe Schneck and Texan author Merritt Tierce. They will be in conversation with AF Director Emeline Colson (talk in English with a French touch).

8pm – 10 pm: MUSIC AND DANCE: DJ female artists playlist

Colombe Schneck is documentary film director, a journalist, and the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. She has received prizes from the Académie française, Madame Figaro, and the Société des gens de lettres. On May 14, 2024, Penguin Press will publish SWIMMING IN PARIS, a stunning autofictional triptych of a woman’s life in three stories (Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming: A Love Story), that marks the first English translation from Colombe. SWIMMING IN PARIS is a decades-long exploration of sexuality, abortion, friendship, femininity, death, and the complicated relationships that women so often have with their own bodies.

In Pamela Druckerman’s words, “Schneck offers a periscopic view into bourgeois Paris and captures the terror and truth of love like only a Frenchwoman can.”

Sponsored by Alliance Française Dallas. More information.

A reading to celebrate a new anthology from Catapult, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters.

What is desire? And what are its rules? In this daring collection, award-winning and emerging female writers share their innermost longings, in turn dismantling both personal and political constructs of what desire is or can be.

Including pieces by Angela Cardinale, Sonia Maria David, Tara Conklin, Torrey Peters, Camille Dungy, Melissa Febos, Lisa Taddeo, Elisa Albert, Merritt Tierce, and others, these candid and insightful essays tackle the complicated knot of women’s desire.

Contributors Angela Cardinale, Sonia Maria David, and Merritt Tierce will be joined in conversation by editor Margot Kahn.

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Select advance praise for a novel structured as nine menstrual cycles:

“a bold and unapologetically feminist grunge rock anthem in literary form”

“unapologetically vulgar and intellectually curious”

“the wettest panties in literature”

“an unabashed story of the life of a Jewish musician/mystic in the early 21st century”

More information about the event.

For 59 years, Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest has been proud to provide accessible, affordable sexual and reproductive health care. This year Planned Parenthood celebrates with Ready. Resilient. Brave. — a nod to the courage of staff, donors, and patients; and the movement’s determination to provide compassionate care today, tomorrow, and always, no matter what.

More information.

The latest developments around medication abortion, how telemedicine plays a role, and the few but powerful depictions of it on recent TV: a conversation sponsored by Hollywood Health & Society and the Writers’ Guild of America. This is an online event at 4 PM PST/7 PM EST.

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Watch the recording of this event.

Order FREE tickets for this Zoom event: more information.

Loved and Wanted is the passionate story of a woman’s love for her children, and a poignant and bracing look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day. Parravani paints an utterly necessary, groundbreaking portrait of so much more than one woman’s choice, offering a fierce and essential explication of the many forces that constrain reproductive freedom. This is a book about marriage, about being a woman, about work and motherhood and desire and loss and all the ordinary tragedies and raptures of family. But this is also a book about how broken our healthcare system is, about an entrenched and toxic class divide that damages our lives and harms the bodies of our children. In a country riven by the need to reduce, to simplify, to ignore, Loved and Wanted challenges us to pay attention, to hold complexity, and to understand why we have to do better.

The Freya Project hosts intimate, inspiring readings that connect people to small non-profits working at the front lines of human rights. At their upcoming reading at The Wing in Los Angeles, readers will share stories, poems, and/or personal essays about a time they felt seen.

All proceeds will benefit the Texas Equal Access Fund, a Dallas-based nonprofit abortion fund that helps low-income people access abortion when they can’t afford it.

Merritt was a founding board member of the TEA Fund, and served as its executive director 2011-2014. She will speak briefly about TEA Fund’s work and mission.

More information and tickets.

AWP panel with Claire Vaye Watkins, Nalo Hopkinson, Mary Ann Mohanraj, and Debra Monroe, moderated by Kate Simonian.

One way to define dirt is as ‘matter out of place.’ Is ‘dirty’ literature labelled as such because of its content, or because of its irreverent treatment of such matter? What would advocates of heteroglossia or mixed discourses think of ‘dirty fiction’—that its determined blending makes it the sharpest edge of realism? Is the depiction of sex crucial to the goals of feminisms, and how? This all-woman panel discusses craft hazards and opportunities of rendering the sexually explicit.

Join the Whiting Foundation for readings in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and drama by the ten talented winners of the 2019 Whiting Awards! The writers will be introduced by Alexander Chee, Whiting 2003 fiction winner and author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Wine and cheese will be served throughout the evening.

The Whiting Foundation provides support for writers and scholars who astonish us by expanding the boundaries of art and understanding. Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.

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Two groundbreaking debut story collections published last year investigate relationships, desire, gender, and transformation, from powerfully queer and brilliantly real perspectives. Merritt Tierce will moderate a conversation between Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties, and Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals: Stories, that will explore the authors' interests and expertise in writing "dark" stories (what exactly does that mean?), breaking and inventing fictional forms, how the body and the self are connected, and how literature can shape and explain and be that connection.

With Melissa Febos et al. 

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SoundCloud recording of reading.

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With Matthew Salesses and Joshua Foster.

With Alma Guillermoprieto, Darryl Dickson Carr, Lisa Hembry, Will Evans and Lauren Smart.

Più Libri Più Liberi with Martina Testa.

With Martina Testa.

With Marco Rossari and Martina Testa.

With Paolo Cognetti and Marta Ciccolari (La McMusa).