My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire Book Launch

Join us on Saturday, November 21 at 4pm to celebrate the launch of Johanna Hedva’s new book My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire (Sming Sming Books, 2026) with readings by Hedva, Zefyr Lisowski, Geoffrey Mak, and Aurora Mattia, and a concluding performance.

My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire gathers fourteen years of Hedva’s shape-shifting writing into one book: essays, stories, poems, a play, litanies, spells, fables, devotionals, omens, a curse, and a seance. The writing moves across fiction, criticism, philosophy, poetry, divination, and apparitions of the artist’s own sculptures and installations, a field guide to the ruins and enchantments of the present.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American artist, writer, and musician based between Los Angeles and New York. They are the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die, winner of the Amber Hollibaugh Award, and the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell. Hedva has exhibited at Modern Art Oxford, MASS MoCA, Migros Museum Zürich, Gropius Bau Berlin, and the Seoul Mediacity and Shanghai Biennials.

Zefyr Lisowski is the author of the essay collection Uncanny Valley Girls (Harper Perennial 2025), a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Leslie Feinberg Award and a Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. She’s also the author of two poetry collections, Girl Work (Noemi Press 2024), winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award, and Blood Box (Black Lawrence 2019). She lives in Brooklyn and at zefyrlisowski.com.

Geoffrey Mak is the author of the personal essay collection Mean Boys, and an editor of the anthology Writing on Raving. His novel Total Depravity is forthcoming in July 2027.

Aurora Mattia is from Texas. Nightboat has published two of her books: a novel called The Fifth Wound and a story collection called Unsex Me Here. Her third, another novel called Seven Come Eleven, is coming from Nightboat at the beginning of 2028. She’s writing a new book called Green-Broke, half stories and half essays. It doesn’t have a publisher yet.