Oral Florist Afternoon Tea Panel with Rita Bullwinkel, Patrick Cottrell, Sarah Gerard, Léonie Guyer, and Ismail Muhammad.
Rita Bullwinkel discusses the inspiration behind the Oral Florist sound library and the process that brought it to life. She is joined by four contributors for a conversation about their own work, why they chose their Oral Florist texts, and the joys of reading aloud.
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the story collection Belly Up, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s and a Contributing Editor for NOON. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts.
Patrick Cottrell was born in Korea and raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee. His work has appeared in Guernica, BOMB, and Gulf Coast, among other publications. Sorry To Disrupt the Peace, Cottrell’s first novel, was long-listed for the Times Literary Supplement’s Republic of Consciousness Prize, and was the winner of the Best First Book – Fiction 2017 National Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction. Cottrell is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award and teaches at the University of Denver.
Sarah Gerard is the author of three books. Her essay collection Sunshine State was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her novel Binary Star was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a best-book-of-the-year at NPR, Vanity Fair, and Buzzfeed. Her novel True Love was a Best Book of 2020 at Glamour and Bustle, and winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award. Her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Baffler, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature, and many others. Her paper collages have appeared in Hazlitt, BOMB Magazine, The Creative Independent, Epiphany Magazine, No Tokens Journal, and the Blue Earth Review. Recycle, a co-authored book of collages and text, was published by Pacific in 2018.
Léonie Guyer makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, and books. Her work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces. Guyer’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and held in numerous public collections including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Reed College Art Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and others. Guyer has collaborated on book projects with poets Franck André Jamme and Bill Berkson. She was born in New York, NY and lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
Ismail Muhammad is a writer and critic based in Oakland, where he works as a story editor at The New York Times Magazine. Until recently he was the criticism editor at The Believer. His work has appeared in the Times Book Review, Paris Review, Catapult, The Nation, Bookforum, and other venues. He’s currently working on a novel.