FREE EVENT! - "Magdelena is Brighter Than You Think" by Grace Spulak (w/ Sara Tang)

Date: Thursday, October 22 Time: 7-8pm Location: White Whale Bookstore (or livestream) Please register via White Whale's event page, which can be found HERE. On October 22, Grace Spulak, winner of the 2025 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, will be at White Whale Bookstore for a celebratory reading from her prize-winning collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think! K-Ming Chang described the Spulak's debut as, “a breathtaking collection that is rooted in place, people, and the full scope of who you are and who you get to be...these stories gaze clear-eyed at what life is for those who are marginalized, but also what life can be. " Grace will be joined in conversation by local multidisciplinary artist, Sara Tang. Inventive and emotionally nuanced, Grace Spulak’s debut story collection explores the complexities of gender, queerness, trauma, and resilience through characters who live in the margins and imagine new ways to survive there. Pushing the boundaries of traditional narratives and forms, these stories suggest paths for picking up our pieces—and for transforming and escaping the realities that constrain us. A social worker becomes entangled in the life of a woman she’s meant to investigate, blurring the line between empathy and obsession. A veterinary student communes with a yak that seems to speak to her—if only she could understand its message. And a separating couple embarks on one last errand together to unburden themselves of an unsettling memento. Set in rural New Mexico—a place of isolation, strange beauty, and potential transformation—this collection offers unexpected flashes of grace and hope. “With care and attention to its brilliantly complicated and kaleidoscopic characters, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think is a breathtaking collection that is rooted in place, people, and the full scope of who you are and who you get to be. Exploring queerness, gender, poverty, generational trauma, and the ways in which we are formed and form others, the stories in this collection have the scope of sagas and the intimacy of untold secrets. With precise language and endings that open up, reverberate, and resound with complex and multifaceted song, these stories gaze clear-eyed at what life is for those who are marginalized, but also what life can be. With sentences that ricochet off the page, this book shows us how to sit with the wholeness of existence, the persistence of injustice, and the unresolved question of whether change is possible, both personal and collective.” —K-Ming Chang, author of Exhausted Monsters GRACE SPULAK is the author of the short story collection Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think (April 2026), winner of the 2025 Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize. A writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico, she holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work was awarded Witness Magazine’s 2021 Literary Award in Fiction and has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, Nimrod International Journal, and Southwest Review, among others, and her work has received support from Trillium Arts, New Mexico Writers, and Poets & Writers. SARA TANG (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines the intersections of chronic illness, identity, ecopsychology, and the sacred in the discarded and underseen. Sara is a member of the #notwhite Collective and is the Digital Content Curator for Anthropology of Motherhood. She has served on the leadership of JADED PGH Asian American Pacific Islander collective and with folkLAB’s These Hollow Hills artist residency program. You can find them glitching out in liminal spaces or exploring the underground powers that pulse through Pittsburgh.