We’re excited to announce Sarah Wang, Sam Heaps, & Taylor De La Peña as our September Personal Velocity lineup.

Organized by Katie Bennett, Personal Velocity is a monthly reading series featuring personal essays by writers who identify as women and nonbinary. The series will run every month from Aug '25 - Aug '26, thanks to a generous grant from Penn Treaty Special Services District.

Accessibility note: Personal Velocity is held in the basement workshop space at H&H Books, which is down a flight of stairs.

About the Authors:

Sarah Wang has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, NYSCA/NYFA, PEN America Writing for Justice, and Center for Fiction. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Nation, and n+1, among others. Her debut novel, NEW SKIN, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in May 2026.

Sam Heaps teaches writing at Temple University and studies political theory at NYU. They are the author of the novella The Living god, forthcoming from SARKA in October, and the memoir Proximity (Clash 2023). 

Taylor De La Peñais a mixed Filipina-American author. She has an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University - Camden and lives in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Nashville Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Fiery Scribe Review, and miniskirt magazine.