Touring the East Coast for her memoir Desire Lines, novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young will appear with memoirist Minda Honey, author of The Heartbreak Years, at H&H Books on Friday, October 16 at 7 PM.
Mapping the trajectory from struggle to self-determination, Kristen and Minda will each read briefly from their books before discussing the many paths to liberation. Audience participation is most welcome; a Q&A and book signing will follow the authors' discussion.
Desire Lines will be available for purchase at the event. You can also preorder a copy with H&H Books!
Registration is free and highly recommended. Tickets are free or pay-what-you-want!
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About Desire Lines:
In her debut memoir, award-winning novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young seeks possibilities for women's liberation amid the ongoing erosion of our human rights. Desire Lines excavates submerged truths about motherhood, the body, and the sacred.
Desire Lines takes its title from footpaths--of necessity, defiance and longing--that emerge next to the routes that were planned for us. Challenging herself to be a mother unlike what she has known, Millares Young centers her own body as a site of resistance and making.
Tracing her matrilineage from Cuba to Spain, Millares Young uncovers the remnants of a pagan cult whose mother goddess, Cybele, was erased to make way for the Virgin Mary. But Cybele was no virgin. On the edge of an impasse, written as both invitation and veil, Desire Lines reclaims the power siphoned from women's stories, wielding the lyric essay for awakening consciousness.
About the Authors:
Kristen Millares Young is a novelist, journalist, essayist, and the author of the memoir Desire Lines (Red Hen Press). Called “searching, generous, and unrelenting” by Melissa Febos, Desire Lines is a forensic investigation into the emotional topography of being a woman, a writer, and a mother. Ms. Magazine named Desire Lines a “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026.” Her novel Subduction was a staff pick of The Paris Review and deemed “whip-smart” by the Washington Post and “a brilliant debut” by the Seattle Times. Winner of Nautilus and IPPY awards, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year.
Her essays, book reviews, and investigations appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Literary Hub, and the anthologies No Contact, Advanced Creative Nonfiction, Latina Outsiders, and Alone Together, winner of a 2021 Washington State Book Award. In 2025, Kristen was in residence for the Storyknife Writers Retreat and for a UNESCO Cities of Literature fellowship in Reykjavík, Iceland. A former Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, she is the editor of Seismic, a finalist for a 2021 Washington State Book Award. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Minda Honey’s (she/her) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard, and Longreads.
Her work is a featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger”, “A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South”, and “Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic.”
Minda served as Feature Writing juror of the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes. She has received support for her writing from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Château d’Orquevaux, Storyknife, VONA, VCCA and the Community of Writers.
Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time. She is the founder of "Writing For Fakers (Imposters Wanted.)" and sends out a weekly newsletter. Subscribe at newsletter.writingforfakers.com.