Freda Epum will be at Call & Response Books to discuss her latest book, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show. Merging memoir, poetry, and criticism, this radical literary revue traces a first-generation Nigerian American's search for home and belonging on her own terms.
In three parts, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show traces the joys and despairs of an imaginary house hunt. Epum takes the real-life housing inequity she encounters and spins it into a sprawling meditation on the larger cost of living and enduring as a Black disabled woman in America. Brick by brick, and despite the difficulties she faces, Epum creates space for women, people of color, disabled people, children of immigrants, and anyone else who has felt "in-between."
Freda Epum is a Nigerian American writer and artist. She is the author of two chapbooks, Input/Outputand Entryways into memories that might assemble me, which won the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Competition. She is the co-creator of the Black American Tree Project. Epum's work has been published in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Vol. 1. Brooklyn, Entropy, Bending Genres, and others. She received her MFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Originally from Tucson, she now lives in Cincinnati.