Book Talk: Let All Our Ghosts Depart with Meghana Mysore

We're welcoming poet and essayist Meghana Mysore in celebration of her new short story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart! Join us for a discussion of Meghana Mysore's new book, Let All Our Ghosts Depart, a genre-bending collection of short stories exploring indentity, place, and womanhood. Meghana will be joined by author Puloma Ghosh; Q&A and signing to follow discussion! About the Book In Meghana Mysore's debut short story collection, present-day women and girls of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. In the world of these stories, ghosts are real--in "Repair Shop," dead mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars; in "Hoarder," the narrator's ex-lovers transform into scarves that won't let her go. In another story, a daughter, trapped inside her grief, spends her days Face Timing with her dead father, watching him become a young man she never knew. At turns absurd and darkly humorous, and sometimes speculative, Mysore's stories touch on real-life experiences of intergenerational trauma, womanhood, the fluidity of desire and longing, and coming home to one's body. Her characters have faced violences small and large, holding losses that bind them to their pasts and weigh them down in daily life. Each of these stories contains an experience of transformation, be it small or monumental for these women, who find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances. Meghana Mysore is an Indian American writer, teacher, and the author of the short story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart (West Virginia University Press). Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review,and The Audacity, among other publications. She is the winner of the 2025 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, selected by Marian Crotty. A 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow, Meghana has also received recognition from McCormack Writing Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, The de Groot Foundation, and the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She holds a B.A. in English from Yale and an M.F.A. from Hollins. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Randolph College. She's from Portland, Oregon. Puloma Ghosh is the author of the short story collection, Mouth, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her work has appeared in One Story, Cake Zine, No Tokens, Book of the Month’s Volume Ø and elsewhere, and is collected in The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2025. She has received fellowships from Tin House and Bennington College, and lives in Chicago.