Patchwork Literary Salon: Alter, Lisowski, Taylor

Patchwork Literary Salon brings together authors across genres and stages in their careers to create a colorful tapestry of Brooklyn’s writing community. Curated and hosted by Nadine Santoro, this monthly reading series features brief readings, lively conversation, drink specials, and an opportunity to mingle and connect with fellow writers and readers!

This November, we're keeping the Halloween magic alive with a lineup of writers whose work deals in the haunting and horrific. Join us in welcoming Elina Alter, Zefyr Lisowski, and Leila Taylor!

DATE: Wednesday, November 12
TIME: 7:00pm doors; 7:30 start
LOCATION: SISTERS, 900 Fulton St., Brooklyn, NY 11238
FREE! Your RSVP is appreciated to help us gauge venue capacity.

Our series bookseller is Hive Mind Books, and a portion of book sale proceeds from each event benefit the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

🪡 ABOUT OUR READERS 🪡

ELINA ALTER is a writer and the translator of Alla Gorbunova's story collection (Th)ings and (Th)oughts and novel-in-stories It's the End of the World, My Love, both published by Deep Vellum. Other translations include Oksana Vasyakina's novel Steppe, which will be out this January, and Wound, which was one of the New Yorker's Best Books of the Year.

ZEFYR LISOWSKI is the author of Uncanny Valley Girls, an essay collection about horror movies, exes, and intimacy (Harper Perennial 2025). A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, she’s also the author of two poetry collections, Girl Work (Noemi Press 2024) and Blood Box (Black Lawrence 2019). Raised in the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, Zefyr lives in Brooklyn and has seen grave robbers twice.

LEILA TAYLOR (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history, horror and the gothic in contemporary art, media, and culture. Author of Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread and Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, her work has appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, The Repeater Book of the Occult, Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay, and the graphic novel Bitter Root. She’s given talks on the eerie and the esoteric for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Morbid Anatomy, The International Gothic Association, The Collective for Radical Death Studies, and The Occult Humanities Conference. By day, she is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library.

Patchwork is hosted by NADINE SANTORO. Nadine is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator. She works as the Publicity Director at Deep Vellum, leads retreats, and teaches on creative attention. Nadine is the co-host of the podcast Thinking Straight, a lesbian anthropological dig into the world of heterosexual romance novels. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife and their two senior dogs, Neil and Knives.