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A Reading and Conversation with Jennifer Quartararo and Meghan Gilliss

  • SPACE 538 Congress Street Portland, ME United States (map)

Please join us at SPACE Gallery for a reading and conversation with Jennifer Quartararo and Meghan Gilliss, moderated by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc. The event is co-sponsored by SPACE and MWPA.

Jenny Boully writes, “An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value asks the reader to consider the worth of the minuscule, the overlooked, the ways in which we navigate in order to preserve and persevere." And Paul Yoon writes, “Lungfish is a force of nature—a deeply felt marvel of a book that navigates grief, parenthood, and the mysteries of family with unrelenting power and precision. Here is a story about the islands we build and carry with us. Here is storytelling at its best.”

This event is free, and RSVP is required—please click on the button above to save your seat.

Books will be sold by Back Cove Books.


Meghan Gilliss attended the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a fellow of the Hewnoaks Artist Residency. She has worked as a journalist, a bookseller, a librarian, and a hospital worker, and lives in Portland. Lungfish is her first novel.


Jennifer Quartararo is a Detroit-based writer and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Northern Michigan University. Her essays have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Quarter After Eight, saltfront, Hobart, COVEN Berlin, and After Happy Hour Review, among others. Her debut book of creative nonfiction, An Arbitrary Formation of Unspecified Value, is out now from PANK Books. She ​was long listed in the 2020 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards and was a semi-finalist in the 2019 Pleiades Press Short Prose Book Contest. She's taught creative writing to kids in Detroit Public Schools through the organization InsideOut Literary Arts as well as to kids in the juvenile detention system through Youth Arts Alliance. In the winter of 2021 she was a resident at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, ME.


Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published in 2012. The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including Orion, The New Republic, and Tin House, and Narrative. His second book of poems, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021.