Jan Tramontano + Judyth Emanuel

This event is free to attend. Please RSVP online. Doors open 30 minutes before the start of the event.

Join us for a double book launch bash! We’ll be celebrating the release of Jan Marin Tramontano’s What Love Becomes and Judyth Emanuel’s Yeh-Hell-Ow.

Yeh-Hell-Ow by Judyth Emanuel: Unconventional language smashes the tedious march of sentences. Words, metaphors, phrases, descriptions, lists explode off the page in an irreverent transcendence. Brisk scenes contort, swell and recede. Searing threads of hatred, confusion, ignorance, pain, humor, abuse rupture the narrative which stresses one fact: there is no place for the sensitive and stupid in this world set in the 1970’s.

Uniqueness, the abject feminine, bewilderment, self-hatred, banal traumas and the comedic speaks to women and has a strange appeal for men.

What Love Becomes by Jan Marin Tramontano: What Love Becomes is a work of literary fiction that traces the intimate landscape of two contemporary marriages from their idealistic, yet misguided beginnings. Each couple mistakenly believe their happily ever after will come without really knowing who’ve they’ve married. What begins as self-deception quickly morphs into deception on a larger scale. Over time, their wounds come to define them—a marine, chronically ill from pills he took in the Persian Gulf War to protect him from Sarin gas, a ballet dancer whose ambitions are crushed by a single encounter, a woman desperate to have a baby, a man whose wife barely tolerates him and can’t bring herself to love their child. Long simmering tensions ultimately explode and the couples’ lives intertwine as the novel weaves through past and present. At its heart, this story is about the choices we make, how they shape our lives, and how our innate resilience propels us toward reclaiming the lost parts of ourselves.

Judyth Emanuel is one of three winners in 2017 Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared in Joiner Bay, The Margaret River 2017 Anthology and literary journals Overland, Electric Literature, Literary Orphans, The Fanzine, STORGY, Connotations Press, Jellyfish Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine and elsewhere. Judyth graduated BA Visual Communications, BA Fine Arts and MA Creative Writing. She has lived in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, London, Cyprus and Boston and now lives in Sydney, Australia and New York City.

Jan Marin Tramontano is a novelist and poet. Her books include a novel, Standing on the Corner of Lost and Found, three poetry chapbooks, Floating Islands, A Woman Sitting in a Café and Other Poems of Paris, and Paternal Nocturne, and her father’s memoir, I am a Fortunate Man. Her poems also appear in her poetry collective’s anthologies, Java Wednesdays. and Peer Glass Review. Her short stories, poetry and novel excerpts have been published in numerous literary journals, magazines, and newspapers such as Adelaide Literary Magazine, AOIS 21, Up the River, Poets Canvas, Chronogram, Women’s Synergy, Knock, The DuPage Valley Review, Moms Literary Review, New Verse News and Byline. Her work also appears in Ophelia’s Mom and Surviving Ophelia. In addition, her poems have won several poetry contests including Poets & Writers. She has participated in writing workshops throughout the country including the New York State Writers Institute, Florida Gulf Coast University’s Renaissance Academy’s Writers Collaborative, the Iowa Summer Writers Festival, a summer writing workshop at Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico, and the International Women’s Writing Guild. Tramontano belongs to the Marco Island Writers Association and served on the board and as program chair of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. She now lives with her husband in Naples, Florida.