David Meischen in Conversation with Cynthia Sylvester

Bookworks | 4022 Rio Grande Blvd. NE, Albuquerque, NM 87107

David Meischen, author of Nopalito, Texas: StoriesBook cover of Nopalito, Texas by David MeischenJoin us at Bookworks on June 30 to enjoy David Meischen in conversation with Cynthia Sylvester, author of The Half-White Album, about his new book, Nopalito, Texas: Stories.

In Meischen’s stunning debut story collection, everyone’s got the blues but nobody is willing to sing it. Evelyn Smith, Candace Lambert, and Dorene Wahrmund chafe against rigid small-town expectations. Others in hardscrabble Nopalito find themselves fenced in—an aging gay liquor store owner estranged among his neighbors, a mother and son bound by mutual resentment, two neighboring farm boys attracted to each other. Their stories are driven by desperation, rarely spoken, that troubles the community’s inhabitants as it nudges them toward connection, toward moments of hope. Meischen draws these characters with a tenderness that belies the hardness of their lives.

David Meischen is also the author of Caliche Road Poems (Lamar University Press, 2024). Anyone’s Son, from 3: A Taos Press, won Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2020. A Pushcart honoree, with a personal essay in Pushcart Prize XLII, David is cofounder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos     Press. He lives in Albuquerque, NM with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.

Cynthia Sylvester, author of Half-White AlbumCover artwork for The Half-White Album, by Cynthia SylvesterCynthia J. Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné. She is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in ABQ in PrintLeon Literary ReviewLunch TicketAs Us Journal, and Bosque—The Magazine, among others. She was the recipient of the Native Writer Award at the Taos Writer’s Conference and received her MFA in fiction from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Sylvester’s debut book The Half-White Album, published with the University of New Mexico Press, is the 2023 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Best LGBTQ+ book.