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Pilsen Community Books is honored to welcome Derrick Austin, H. Melt, Tara Betts, Mars Marshall, and dr. dez brown to the store for a reading in celebration of brown's new collection they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, a momentous debut, tracking a self-proclaimed anti-heros quest for liberation through the transformative ritual of writing through the past, present, and future. Influenced by video game worlds, choose-your-own adventures, and a multifaceted collective of Mesopotamian goddesses, this collection is a conjuring of selves encountered through gender, and they arise to meet one another in all their Black queer joy and rage.

Derrick Austin’s (he/him) new book of poems is This Elegance (Boa Editions, 2026). His other poetry collections include Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016), which was selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. His other honors include the 2026 AICA-USA Art Critics Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, and the Ron Wallace Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. He lives in Chicago.

H. Melt (they/them) is the author of There Are Trans People Here, which won the Heartland Booksellers Award, selected by independent booksellers across the Midwest. They edited the anthology Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. H. Melt attended the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat, the Tin House Workshop, and was an artist-in-residence at the Newberry Library, researching the Chicago Protest Collection.

Tara Betts (she/her) is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and Arc & Hue. She is a professor in the Peace Studies program at DePaul University and part of the faculty at the Solstice MFA program at Lasell University. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is working on several new projects.

Born and raised in Detroit, MI – MARS. (they/them) is a writer, film photographer, and the author of FLOWER BOI (Gold Line Press, 2022). They earned an MSW from Wayne State University and an MFA from Randolph College. Their work has appeared in Four Way Review, Obsidian Literature & Arts for the African Diaspora, Foglifter, and elsewhere. MARS. is the recipient of the 2021 Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Arts Fellowship and the 2019 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellowship in Poetry. They currently live and love in Chicago.

dr. dez brown (they/he), publishing as dezireé a. brown, is a Black queer nonbinary and transmasculine Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and interdisciplinary scholar, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, was the winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize and a finalist for the 2026 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades. Follow them online at @deziree.the.writer.