H&H Books Presents: Authors Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn & Meghana Mysore

Alysia and Meghana will co-launch their new books, I HAVE THIS THING FOR FLOWERS and LET ALL OUR GHOSTS DEPART! We're delighted to host writers Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn and Meghana Mysore at H&H Books to celebrate their book releases on Tuesday, October 13! Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn and Meghana Mysore will read from their new books, I Have This Thing for Flowers: Essays on the Roots of Relationships & Let All Our Ghosts Depart: Stories, followed by a discussion of representation and the unreal in fiction & nonfiction. A Q&A and book signing will follow the authors’ discussion. I Have This Thing for Flowers and Let All Our Ghosts Depart will be available for purchase at the event. Read more about both books below! Registration is free and highly recommended. Questions? Email [email protected], and follow @theheadandthehand on Instagram for events, book clubs, updates, and more. About the Books: In Meghana Mysore's Let All Our Ghosts Depart, women and girls of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. 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 FaceTiming with her dead father, watching him become a young man she never knew. Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. Six months before her wedding, Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn's fiancé broke off their engagement. Stunned, reeling, and newly uninsured, Alysia married her friend Sarah in an arrangement that secured them both free health insurance. They moved in together in the midst of the pandemic, and with time and while tending a garden, their marriage of convenience grew into a marriage of love. In I Have This Thing For Flowers, Sawchyn likens the many flowers she has grown in her gardens to a range of relationships and moments of her life, reflecting on topics from motherhood to perfumery to scientific illustration. About the Authors: Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. Her essay collection A Fish Growing Lungs was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards, and her second book, I Have This Thing for Flowers, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books. Formerly the editor in chief of The Rumpus, she has received fellowships from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Meghana Mysore is the author of the short story collection Let All Our Ghosts Depart and teaches English and creative writing at Randolph College. The winner of the 2025 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, Meghana’s writing appears in The Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the McCormack Writing Center, and is from Portland, Oregon.