I’m delighted to announce that on Sunday, February 8, 2026 my work will be featured in a reading in Davis, CA called Stories on Stage. A professional actor Eileen Hoang will perform my story “Doctor Sveta” from LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES.

The event starts at 4 pm at Sudwerk Brewing Company in Davis, CA. I can’t wait to see how Eileen might interpret my story “Doctor Sveta,” a historical fiction set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Huge thanks to organizer, author Jeri Howitt, for putting this together, to the whole team behind the event, and to writer Karolina Letunova for recommending my book.

This weekend, I spent an afternoon with a group of about thirty high school students who identify as writers. They banded together to organize Women’s Youth Writing Association (WYWA) with chapters in four local high schools and invited me and Leyla Brittan to give a talk about our writing and writing careers. The participants asked savvy questions about building characters, addressing hyphenated identities on the page, overcoming blocks, finding submissions opportunities, and experimenting with genres. In the face of ever-increasing violence and political instability in the country and in the world, I found this event particularly nourishing. These youths are so talented and motivated!

I have three more links for you today.

• I reviewed a collection Stories from the Edge of the Sea by a Vietnamese-American writer Andrew Lam for The Common. I’m a big fan of Andrew’s work, and I argue in the essay that he really expands and complicates our ideas of what a short story can be. Also, soup.

• I reviewed a novel The Disappearing Act by a Russian author in exile, Maria Stepanova, translated by her long-term collaborator, poet Sasha Dugdale for On the Seawall. Writing this piece, I made up a pseudo-psychological term “the beast anxiety” to describe the state of mind of Stepanova’s protagonist. Then, I immediately diagnosed myself with the symptoms.

• On Punctured Lines this month, read an excerpt from Nadezhda in the Dark, a novel written in verse by Ukrainian-French-American writer Yelena Moskovich. My tagline for this book: The Iliad for post-Soviet Jewish dykes. It’s wild.