After a summer spent settling my mom’s affairs, I’m getting back to work promoting Miss Experience White. The first review, by Richard Modiano for The Literary Underground, was published on August 28th.

“A surrealist incantation and visual explosion that cracks open whiteness with wit, rage, and unsettling beauty ... What elevates Miss Experience White beyond polemic is its refusal to deliver easy moral certainties ... navigating a fractured landscape where identity, history, and complicity collide ... bold, bizarre, and blisteringly honest ... John Seabury’s illustrations are outstanding.” Read the full review here.

The other big piece of news is that I’m going to Texas this month. I’ll be doing a reading in Fort Worth on Sunday, September 14th, at Second Sundays, a monthly literary event hosted by award-winning poet Tammy Gomez. Actually, I’d planned to be in Houston on September 14th, to visit the grave of the woman I dedicated the book to, Alberta Walker, on her 110th heavenly birthday. Fort Worth is only a few hours away. This surrealistic illustration by John Seabury shows the character Sophia, inspired by Alberta, with young Experience White.

Thanks to brilliant poet pal Richard Loranger—whose day job as Power Unit 17 is helping other writers market their work— for getting me the Fort Worth reading. I’ll be flying in and out of Austin to go to a couple of open mics and take the book around to bookstores.

After I get home, I’ll be circulating throughout the Bay Area, taking the book around to stores here. I just started this project, and so far Miss Experience White is currently available in San Francisco at The Beat Museum in North Beach and Bound Together on Haight Street. In the East Bay, you can get it at Moe’s Books, and East Bay Booksellers has it on order. It’s also available at Beer’s Books in Sacramento.

Farther into the future, on December 7th I have a double-header. During the day I’ll be selling the book at the Howard Zinn Bookfair in San Francisco. (Zinn was a historian, writer and activist best known for his book, A People’s History of the United States. His work popularized the practice of telling a “history from below” of workers, women, immigrants, racialized people, LGBTQ+ people, dissidents and radicals.) Then I’ll head over to Spec’s 12 Adler Museum Café in North Beach. One of the poems from Miss Experience White appears in Maintenant 19: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art and I’ll be singing it at the San Francisco release party.

One more distant event on the calendar is on February 5th, a reading in Eureka, California. Many thanks to David Holper, a former high school sweetheart, award-winning poet, and poet laureate emeritus of Eureka, California for getting me this gig.

Yikes, I just turned 65 at the end of August. It’s definitely a milestone which I refuse to wear as a millstone because let’s face it, getting old beats the alternative. And I’ve lost enough close friends to that alternative already. But I’m feeling the necessity of slowing down, finding ways to work more efficiently in a lower gear, and appreciating the benefits of a power nap. This Texas trip will be a chance to incorporate all of the above, but no power naps while on cruise control somewhere in Texas, please!

Milo