Sasha Hom in conversation with Shingai Njeri Kagunda

Come celebrate award-winning author Sasha Wol-Soon Hom’s debut novella Sidework! Joining Sasha Wol-Soon Hom in conversation will be Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller Shingai Njeri Kagunda. Sasha Hom's Sidework is a lyric, page-turning novella about a homeless Korean adoptee and mother of four. During her busy Sunday shift waiting tables, her customers— rock stars, locals, and the Grim Reaper himself— bring her face to face with larger issues of motherhood, suicide, environmental degradation, death, and belonging. In this thought-provoking and often humorous debut from award-winning author Sasha Hom, herself a Korean adoptee and mother of four, the protagonist loses her home when the intentional community/commune where she and her family used to live— off-grid, in a canvas tent on three hundred acres— is sold. Sidework takes place during a Sunday breakfast shift as the homeless hero waits tables at a popular ' Cash Only' diner tucked in the Redwoods, frequented by growers, rock stars, Dreamers, tycoons, and tourists alike. But with each order she takes, each interaction serves only to bring her closer to her ghosts. Unnamed and unknown, from far-off continents, they ask her what it means to be a good mother. Intricately woven, lyric, and atmospherically layered, Hom's debut marries the mystic and mythic with the mundane while taking on issues of immigration, colonization, climate change, homophobia, motherhood, and adoption. Sasha Hom identifies as a text-based artist (sometimes) but has been trained in fiction writing at Warren Wilson College where she earned her MFA. Her first novella, Sidework, was a New Immigrant Writing Series selection published by Black Lawrence Press in March of 2025. She is a recipient of an Elizabeth George Award, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, a Vermont Artist Development Award, a Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing, and a Holden Scholarship awardee. Her work can be found at The Millions, Kweli Journal, Literary Mama and elsewhere. She is a goat farmer and a homeschooling mother of four. After a decade of living in canvas tents in California, her and her family fled wildfires and now live in a yurt on 600-acres of cooperatively owned land in Central Vermont, where she finds herself frequently cold. Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown University. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive from Neon Hemlock Press was the Ignyte Award winner in 2022. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine (a Hugo Award finalist for Best Semiprozine) and the co-founder of Voodoonauts.