Cloud Builder - Weston Morrow in conversation with Chris Vanjonack

oin us at the bookstore on Saturday, September 26th at 2:00PM to usher in the beginnings of "Spooky Season" with some sad boy poetry and short story prose exploring ghosts, death, grief, and the dark humor inevitably therein! Weston Morrow will be in conversation with Chris Vanjonack for his new award winning poetry collection.

**Weston Morrow** is the author of Cloud Builder, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series, forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September 2026. His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in English Literature from Central Washington University. A former print journalist, he teaches writing at The Ohio State University.

*Cloud Builder*

*What do we owe the dead? And what do we–who will soon be dead–owe the living?*

What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of *Cloud Builder*, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington state, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past. These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt “the past, who can’t stop turning back / for one last look”?

**Chris Vanjonack** is a writer and educator from Denver, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Book of the Month Club's Volume 0, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, CRAFT Literary, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and at the Denver School of the Arts.

*Out of Body: Stories*

**"Chris Vanjonack's *Out of Body* is its own singularity. A dazzling collection where characters aren’t bound to a single story, let alone a single universe. Teeming with haunts and heartbreak, this book will leave you breathless." — Gus Moreno, author of *This Thing Between Us***

**A wildly inventive collection of interconnected speculative stories—spanning the multiverse, demonic attachment, and life after death—from an electrifying new voice in fiction.**

An aimless ghost haunts his ex-girlfriend for evidence that she’s actually upset about his death.

A group of teens discovers a machine that purports to predict the best day of its users’ lives.

A young woman is horrified to discover that an aggressive stranger she met on a night of bar-hopping now manifests in every photo that is taken of her.