WELCOME TO THE HVWC CALENDAR: home of all our upcoming readings, events and workshops. You can view by list or calendar (see right menu to choose). Click the colored tabs below to show only specific options. Our workshops run as multi-session series or one-day “intensives.” Note, we list the multi-session courses on the first day they meet only. The full dates of the session are described in the course descriptions. You would need to scroll back to the start date if you needed to enroll for something already underway. But do let us know if you want to join something in midstream since we need the blessing of the instructor. Questions? Email us.
Workshops – This category encompasses all one-day and multi-week classes, whether in person or via Zoom.
Readings – Our readings are in many different genres and take place in person, on Zoom, or both!
HVWC Recurring Events – This category encompasses such regular favorites as Open Mic, Open Write, and Submission Sunday.
Special Events – These other creative experiences are sure to interest our creative community!
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Launch Event of HVWC Reads: Hum by Helen Phillips, a new book club hosted by Jonathan Vatner (via Zoom)
September 5 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Free – $50.00
Join HVWC Year of Your Book Faculty Member, Jonathan Vatner, as he launches the first event of HVWC Reads where our community reads four books of prose a year starting with Hum by Helen Phillips!
NB: The Book Club discussion is free on Zoom for our community. (Donations towards our readings series honoraria are greatly appreciated!) Come to our book club discussion with Jonathan & then come to hear Helen Phillips read and have her sign your copy of Hum at HVWC on Sunday September 8th at 4pm.
Named Most Anticipated by Goodreads, LitHub, and Book Riot, this “tense dystopian thriller” (Time) captures an urgent and unflinching portrayal of a woman’s fight for her family’s security in a world shaped by global warming and rapid technological progress.
In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.
Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.
Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including the novel The Need, a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children.
Jonathan Vatner is the author of The Bridesmaids Union (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and Carnegie Hill (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). His novels have earned praise from People, Town & Country, The New York Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the managing editor of Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology, and teaches fiction writing at New York University. He lives in Yonkers, NY, with his husband and cats.