We’re excited to announce our January Personal Velocity lineup: Emily Van Duyne, Gina Myers, and Rae Pagliarulo.

Organized by Katie Bennett, Personal Velocity is a monthly reading series featuring personal essays by women, nonbinary, and trans writers. 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:

Rae Pagliarulo (she/her) is the associate editor of Hippocampus Magazine and has published poems, articles, and essays with Short Reads, Cleaver Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and more. She is the co-editor of Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction (Books by Hippocampus, 2021), and by day, she runs a consultancy called Ellipsis Strategies, helping Philadelphia nonprofits to achieve their missions through strategy and fundraising.

Gina Myers is the author of four books of poetry, including Works & Days (Radiator Press, 2025) and Some of the Times (Barrelhouse, 2020). She lives in Philadelphia where she co-edits the tiny with Ebs Sanders and Cul-de-sac of Blood with J †Johnson.

Emily Van Duyne lives in New Jersey with her family, where she is Associate Professor of Writing at Stockton University. Her book Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (W.W. Norton & Co., 2024) was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and BookPage. She is working on a memoir about rape, whiteness, and education called UNRELIABLE: A MEMOIR IN DISBELIEF.