A launch party for We Were Seeds: Western New York Voices in Solidarity with Palestine and the season finale Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Silo City Reading Series happen this coming weekend.

Tuesday, Aug. 25, 6 p.m.: The State of Things Book Club reads and discusses The Age of Loneliness (Graywolf Press, 2024) by Buffalo-based author Laura Marris, who will be on hand to participate in the discussion. Fitz Books and Waffles, 1462 Main St., Buffalo.

In this debut essay collection, Laura Marris reframes environmental degradation by setting aside the conventional, catastrophic framework of the Anthropocene in favor of that of the Eremocene, the age of loneliness, marked by the dramatic thinning of wildlife populations and by isolation between and among species. She asks: How do we add to archives of ecological memory? How can we notice and document what’s missing in the landscapes closest to us?

Filled with equal parts alienation and wonder, each essay immerses readers in a different strange landscape of the Eremocene. Among them are the Buffalo airport with its snowy owls and the purgatories of commuter flights, layovers, and long-distance relationships; a life-size model city built solely for self-driving cars; the coasts of New England and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and horseshoe crabs; and the Connecticut woods Marris revisits for the first time after her father’s death, where she participates in the annual Christmas Bird Count and encounters presence and absence in turn.

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Harper’s, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, The TLS, The New York Times, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, a Katharine Bakeless Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, was published by Graywolf in August, 2024.

Her translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague (Knopf). With Alice Kaplan, she is also the co-author of a book of criticism about the novel called States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic (University of Chicago Press, with a French edition translated by Patrick Hersant for Gallimard). She has translated Louis Guilloux’s Blood Dark (New York Review Books), Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan and Other Poems (with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press), Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget (Scribner), Jean-Yves Frétigné’s To Live is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci (University of Chicago Press), Christophe Boltanski’s The Safe House (University of Chicago Press), as well as a Proust comic book and experimental translation projects for Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Lukas Prizes, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University at Buffalo and a Teaching Artist at Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Thursday, Aug. 27, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Kenmore Village Improvement Society/Made for Good Open Mic Poetry Night hosted by Geoffrey Gatza and featuring poet Corey Bley. Kenmore Village Improvement Society/ Made for Good Shop. Address: 7 Warren Ave. Kenmore, NY 14217.

Corey Bley is a High School Art teacher who currently teaches Ceramics and Sculpture full time in Niagara Falls.

An evening of poetry, community, and conversation at KVIS / Made for Good Shop in Kenmore. This month’s audience-chosen optional theme is “August Heat.” Whether the theme inspires a poem, a memory, a dream, or something unexpected, we’d love to hear it. All are welcome. Bring a poem to share or simply come and listen.

Friday, Aug. 28, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.: 4th Friday Poetry Series featuring Buffalo-based poet Tim Joyce. Additional reading slots available. Dog Ears Bookstore & Café, 688 Abbott Rd., Buffalo. $5.

Friday, Aug. 28, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.: Publication release party for We Were Seeds: Western New York Voices in Solidarity with Palestine edited by Sara Ali and Joe Hall. Fitz Books and Waffles, 1462 Main St., Buffalo.

The evening, cosponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace Buffalo, will feature readings by contributors to the zine formatted anthology, performance by a “singing resistance” group led by Jazz Milliner, and homemade Palestinian desserts. Sliding scale donations will go to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Copies of the publication, which feature Jazz Milliner’s cover art, and Jacob Reber’s layout and design, will be on sale for purchase with proceeds to benefit the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

Saturday, Aug. 29, 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.: Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Silo City Reading Series featuring poets Tarfia Faizullah and 2026 JBLC Poetry Fellow Siew Hii as featured performers at an event also featuring a musical performance by Olivia Block, and an installation by visual artist D. Sloan.

About the Poets and Featured Performers:

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of the poetry collections, Alien of Extraordinary Ability (forthcoming from Haymarket Books 2027), Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in The Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, The New Republic, The Nation, and Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Tarfia currently lives in Dallas.

Siew Hii (she/they) is the winner of the 2026 Just Buffalo Literary Center Poetry Fellowship and will visit Buffalo this August for a writing residency and read at the August 29 Silo City Reading Series event. They are the author of Entered Some Aliens (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026). Her prose and poetry appear in AGNI, Electric Lit, Story, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Mobile, Alabama, Hii now lives in Orlando, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Her parents hail from Sibu, Malaysia and Kentucky, USA.

Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. Her discography, spanning nearly thirty years, is published on Another Timbre, Black Truffle, Erstwhile, Ina GRM, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. She performs live experimental music, where at any given concert she might be playing electronic instruments, piano, organ or amplified objects. Block also creates surround sound concerts, sound installations and scores. Block has performed, premiered and exhibited her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals and performance series including Rewire, MoogFest, Festival del Bosque Germinal, Sonic Light, Redbull Academy, Kontraste, Archipel, and many others. Her installations have been shown at The Nasher Sculpture Museum, The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Arthur Ross Gallery at University of Pennsylvania, CEAM at Flagler University, MCA Chicago, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Museo Reina Sofia, The Smart Museum at University of Chicago, Manhattan Museum of Arts and Design, Sokolowsko Sanitorium (Poland), CONTEXT (Miami and NY) and The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (Chicago). She has taught at The School of the Art Institute in the Sound Department and at Northwestern University in the Sound Arts and Industries program. She has completed many university teaching residencies and teaches workshops around the world. Olivia is based in Chicago, and travels widely for her work.

Visual artist D. Sloan (b. 1990) traded the Vegas heat for the Buffalo cold. She co-curates the Museum of Cold—an archive of cold as muse, co-edits the theory-fiction journal TRANSVERSALS, and is the proprietor of a flower shop. She creates alternative systems for divining the future through casting lots (keys and coins, in this case). She likes to write with photography and prefers not to use the viewfinder, instead trading composition for spiritual intervention.

Silo City Reading Series events take place in Marine A grain elevator, behind Duende at Silo City, 85 Silo City Row. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the events begin at 7:30 p.m. Books by featured poets in the series will be available for purchase by Buffalo bookseller Fitz Books. As of August 1st, the event is sold out. Contact www.justbuffalo.org for further information.