Join us at 7:00 PM on Friday, May 19, at New Dominion Bookshop (404 E. Main St.) for the May Charlottesville Reading Series event, featuring poet Hajjar Baban and novelist Brendan Slocumb. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.

Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. A 2021 PD Soros Fellow, she has poems appearing in Guernica, Pleiades, and Muzzle Magazine. Her chapbook What I Know of the Mountains (Anhinga Press, 2019) was the recipient of the 2018 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. You can find her work at hajjarbaban.com.

Brendan Slocumb graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a degree in music education, with concentrations in violin and viola. He is the author of the novel The Violin Conspiracy, as well as Symphony of Secrets, out now from Anchor/Penguin Random House. For over twenty-five years, Brendan has been a public and private school music educator for grades K–12. He has performed on violin with the Washington Metropolitan Symphony, the McLean Symphony, the Prince George’s Philharmonic, and the Alexandria Symphony, and has served as the concertmaster for the NOVA Symphony. In his spare time, he enjoys writing, exercising, and performing with his rock band, Geppetto’s Wüd.