Upcoming Author Events & Readings
28 upcoming author events and readings from Porter Square Books, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All readings in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 6 · 7:00pm
Erik Mohn discusses his debut memoir Stranger in My Own Story, on coming of age as a transracial adoptee — born to a Black mother he never knew, raised by a white family in small-town Massachusetts — and finding in hip-hop "his first mirror and his first vocabulary." Co-presented by GrubStreet.
Tue Oct 6 · 7:00pm
Dahlberg discusses Breaking Point: When the Criminal Justice System Fails, on why innocent people confess. Working with six exonerees who each falsely confessed and served time, she sets out the interrogation tactics behind a leading cause of wrongful conviction — 13 percent of US exonerations between 1989 and 2024 followed a false confession. Daniel S. Medwed joins her.
Wed Oct 7 · 7:00pm
Liam Callanan discusses Stone Age Astronaut: The Astonishing Adventures of America's Forgotten Flier, a biography of Lester Maitland, who in 1927 became the first person to fly to Hawaii and briefly shared Lindbergh's fame before vanishing from the record. Christopher Castellani, GrubStreet's artistic director, joins him.
Wed Oct 7 · 7:00pm
T.J. English discusses Blood in the Desert: The T. J. English Reader, a first collection of his literary journalism on true crime, jazz, boxing and police corruption across four decades, alongside new work. English wrote The Westies and Havana Nocturne; the Globe's Emily Sweeney joins him.
Thu Oct 8 · 7:00pm
Two poets reading from new collections: Yona Harvey's third book Leap & Grow Feathers, written out of the COVID pandemic and "the static fraying our nerves," and Shara McCallum's Behold. Harvey won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her debut Hemming the Water.
Fri Oct 9 · 6:30pm
The Worst Bestsellers podcast records its 300th episode in front of an audience, returning to the book its first episode covered, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, for a live re-read. The guest is Meredith Goldstein of the Boston Globe, who writes the paper's Love Letters advice column and is the author of the memoir Can't Help Myself: Lessons & Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist.
Sun Oct 11 · 9:30am
Kari Percival, who won the Ezra Jack Keats Award, reads Fall Day, All Day — a picture book about what shifts in the natural world and in us as the leaves turn. A morning story time at the Cambridge shop.
Tue Oct 13 · 7:00pm
Lauren Shaw presents Traces of Impermanence, a photobook setting pictures of her own aging body, its “scars, bruises and marks,” beside images of growth and decay in nature, with essays by Lucy Lippard and Terry Tempest Williams. Shaw studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind and is Professor Emerita of Photography at Emerson College. Laura Blacklow joins her in conversation.
Wed Oct 14 · 7:00pm
Cortney LaCorte launches Oversharing, her cookbook of boards and grazing spreads. The Nashville food creator known online as @cheesegal began by building elaborate cheeseboards for country musicians and went viral for them. The event is ticketed rather than free, unlike most of the shop's author evenings.
Thu Oct 15 · 7:00pm
Psychologist Tania Lombrozo on Why We Ask Why: The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand — what happens when people demand a reason for traffic, for a friend's behaviour, for the colour of the sky. With Paul L. Harris.
Fri Oct 16 · 7:00pm
Susan Neiman, a moral philosopher and author of Evil in Modern Thought, discusses Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, which argues that "naming and confronting evil" is essential to preserving democracy against demagogues. James Wood of the New Yorker joins her.
Sun Oct 18 · 5:00pm
Porter Square Books’ monthly Be the Change series turns to animal rescue with cozy mystery writers Cate Conte, author of the Cat Cafe Mysteries, and Elise Scott, of The Black Cat Detectives, and Sara Kimmel, cat foster coordinator for Broken Tail Rescue. Conte also writes as Liz Mugavero, whose first Pawsitively Organic Mystery was an Agatha Award nominee. The shop donates 20% of the evening’s sales to Broken Tail.
Mon Oct 19 · 7:00pm
Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss, discusses her new novel Sophie, Standing There, "a tender and hilarious novel about heartbreak" whose book-loving heroine, with a dream festival job and a husband she adores, has nonetheless been living alone and estranged since Christmas. Laura Zigman joins her.
Tue Oct 20 · 7:00pm
Mindy Misener discusses her debut novel Good Guys, in which two estranged sisters in a small New England town become "embroiled in a war crime involving a local hero" — a soldier killed in Iraq and famous for being a good guy, whose dark secret one of them uncovers. Mairead Small Staid joins her.
Wed Oct 21 · 7:00pm
Céline Leboeuf, a philosopher, discusses The Tyranny of Thinness, "a fearlessly feminist philosophical approach to defying diet culture," drawing on Beauvoir, Audre Lorde and Roxane Gay to unpack why thinness is framed as something to achieve. Charles More joins her.
Thu Oct 22 · 7:00pm
Sandy Bailey discusses She's On To Something, “a sharp, sapphic romantic thriller about justice, power, desire, and refusing to stay quiet,” which follows a butch SEC prosecutor onto a church-based investment scam draining money from working-class families, and toward the woman who could wreck her career. Bailey drove freight and passenger trains across New England and built houses before law school. Former Cambridge mayor Denise Simmons joins her in conversation.
Sat Oct 24 · 7:00pm
Porter Square Books' third annual horror night pairs signing tables for five authors (Gretchen Felker-Martin, Nicky Gonzalez, Eric LaRocca, Rebecca Mahoney and Aaron Mahnke, creator of the Lore podcast) with a costume contest, a screening of Creature From the Black Lagoon and horror trivia. Each ticket includes a raffle entry for a poster signed by all five and $5 off a purchase that night.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Kathleen Carr Foster launches her debut novel The Jewel of Corlivo on its publication day; it sends a runaway courtesan and her disgraced suitor hunting treasure through a reimagined Byzantine empire. Carr Foster teaches writing at UMass Boston. She holds an MFA from Boston University, where she won the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Prize, and has an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:00pm
Four local novelists — Jenna Blum (Murder Your Darlings), Elizabeth Searle (Lock Her Up), Jessica Treadway (Lacy Eye) and Erica Ferencik (The Blooming) — read briefly, then argue out what a literary thriller actually is, how a literary novelist crosses into the genre, and what the hybrid offers a reader. At Porter Square's Boston Edition inside GrubStreet.
Wed Oct 28 · 7:00pm
Lu discusses her fantasy novel Mortal Things, in which Rose Lin Fairchild is bound as Harbinger to Raven, the god of Death, and is thrust forward as his heir when a murder unsettles the immortal realm — with a rival Harbinger, Étienne Beauchard, set to test her. Lu wrote the Legend and Young Elites series. Fin Leary joins her.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
Alex Gonzalez discusses his novel The Man of Wind and Moss, "a folk horror tale" in which six college friends on a woodland getaway make supernatural deals to survive, pitched as "The Blair Witch Project meets Cabin in the Woods." Paul Tremblay, the horror novelist, joins him.
Fri Oct 30 · 7:00pm
Michelle Lerner, a Harvard-educated lawyer, discusses her memoir A Series of Opinionated Animals, on a life of "loving, chaotic service" to rescue animals — beginning with a neurologically impaired squirrel who insisted on being sat on by his rabbit roommate.
Sun Nov 1 · 9:30am
Padma Venkatraman reads Faraway Family at a morning story time — a picture book about visiting relatives in another country after a long separation, and how the reconnecting takes longer than the travelling. Venkatraman has won awards for her middle-grade novels, several set in India.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
Sarah Bruhn launches Holding On to Home, built on five years of fieldwork and more than a hundred interviews, on how immigrant women's care work in families, schools and neighbourhoods is what makes sanctuary mean anything in practice. Bruhn researches how public policy shapes immigrant families' chances of inclusion.
Wed Nov 11 · 7:00pm
Dan Moren launches Eternity's Tomb, a comic science-fiction heist in which an ex-con named Z, his ursine partner Graham, a "genetically engineered murder bird" and a floating brain in a jar go after a tomb "hurtling through space towards a black hole." Moren, a former Macworld senior editor and two-time Jeopardy! champion, is the author of All Souls Lost and the Galactic Cold War space-opera series.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
M. T. Anderson discusses Stealing Saint Nick, his history of Nicholas of Myra, traced from a third-century child of "a fringe Jewish cult" to Father Christmas, by way of the Great Persecution, the fall of Rome and two thefts of his bones. Anderson won the National Book Award for Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party; the book grew from research for Nicked, his adult debut.
Tue Nov 17 · 7:00pm
Joanne Chang launches The Joy of Cookies: New Classics and Old Favorites to Share. She won a James Beard award and founded the Flour bakeries in Boston; the book opens with a baker's dozen of basic questions before working through cookies from the familiar to the unlikely. One of three Boston-area dates on her tour.
Thu Nov 19 · 7:00pm
Ibtisam Azem discusses The Sleep Thief, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon, which follows Gharib Haifawi as he comes of age, is drawn into resistance and "dreams of a Palestinian identity that will transcend sorrow." Azem, a New York journalist and 2026–27 Radcliffe Fellow, was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize for The Book of Disappearance. William Granara, professor of Arabic literature at Harvard, joins her.
