january, 2026
Event Details
Daniel Pena
Tayyba Kanwal presents her debut collection Talking with Boys (Black Lawrence Press), in conversation with author Daniel Peña (Bang). A community of Pakistani immigrants in Houston distract ICE with unlikely bait. A housekeeper in a Dubai mansion plots to liberate her fellow indentured workers. In Lahore, an empty-nester finds herself bound by more than the jinxed bracelet her adult son has gifted her. Talking with Boys is a collection of linked stories filled with irony, humor, and magic. Spanning generations and continents—from Lahore to Dubai to Houston—these characters navigate economic upheavals, political turmoil, and personal betrayals. Amid crises both imposed and self-inflicted, the people in these stories pursue love, plot for survival and play subtle power games to triumph against patriarchal forces of all genders.
Tayyba Kanwal is a Pakistani-American writer, and editor and author of the short story collection, Talking with Boys (Black Lawrence Press, 2026) She serves as Senior Editor at Conjunctions., and as programming director at the literary arts nonprofit, Inprint, in Houston. Her work appears in journals such as Witness Magazine, Meridian and Gulf Coast Journal, and has won awards including the Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Prize and the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and an MS in Mathematics from the University of Oregon.
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in the beautiful Dallas-Fort Worth area.
