Experimental Novels and Publishing with Indie Presses

Friday, November 7, 2025, 6 p.m.

A panel on experimental novels and publishing with indie presses featuring Makenna Goodman to celebrate her new novel, Helen of Nowhere, with Sasha Hom, author of Sidework, and Shingai Njeri Kagunda, author of & This is How to Stay Alive.

Open to the public. 

Sasha Hom is a text-based artist. Her first novella Sidework (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) is a New Immigrant Writing Series selection. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in The Millions, Leon Literary Review, Exposition Review, and Brink. She is a recipient of an Elizabeth George Award, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, a Vermont Artist Development Award, a Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing, and a Holden Scholarship awardee. She is a goat farmer and a homeschooling mother of four. After a decade of living in canvas tents in California, she relocated to Vermont after fleeing wildfires and now lives in a yurt in the woods on 600-acres of cooperatively owned land where she finds herself frequently cold.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. She has work in or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, and Baffling Magazine. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive (Neon Hemlock Press, 2021). She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts. Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.

Makenna Goodman is the author of two novels, Helen of Nowhere (Coffee House Press, 2025) and The Shame (Milkweed Editions, 2020), and has written for international publications including the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, The White Review, BOMB, The Common, ASTRA Magazine, and Mousse Magazine. Also an editor, she is based in Vermont.