We’re excited to announce our October Personal Velocity lineup: Hannah Bonner, Gina Tomaine, and Lana Lin.
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:
Hannah Bonner is the author of Another Woman (EastOver Press, 2024), the Editor in Chief for Brink, and the Film Editor for TriQuarterly. In 2023-2024 she was an Emerging Critics Fellow for the National Book Critics Circle. Her film and literary criticism has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Another Gaze, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, the Brooklyn Rail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Sewanee Review. She earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa and currently lives in Philadelphia.
Gina Tomaine is a Philadelphia-based writer and editor, and the author of the guidebook for The Philly Tarot Deck. She's written for Rose Books, The Boston Globe, and Philadelphia magazine, among others.
Lana Lin is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2025), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham, 2017). Her film, The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018), won Best Feature Documentary at the San Diego Asian American Film Festival and Favorite Experimental Film at BlackStar Film Festival. Her various works and collaborative mixed media projects (with Lan Thao Lam as “Lin + Lam”) have been exhibited at festivals and art and educational spaces throughout the world. She has been awarded fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and four residencies at MacDowell since 1996. www.lanalin.com; www.linpluslam.com.