Laura Warrell, Tia Williams & Tomi Obaro: A Conversation

Laura Warrell is a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared on HuffPost, and in The Rumpus and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught creative writing and literature at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and through the Emerging Voices Program at PEN America in Los Angeles. In Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (Pantheon), it’s 2013, and Circus Palmer is a 41-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man. When he learns before a gig in Miami that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him, he flees. Palmer lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. But by running away instead of facing the necessary conversation, he sets off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. The most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko. She idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality, even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome Palmer’s rejection. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm explores the perennial dangers of desire and finding belonging when love is unrequited.

Tia Williams had a 15-year career as a beauty editor for magazines including Elle, Glamour, and Essence, and in 2004 pioneered the beauty blog industry with “Shake Your Beauty.” She wrote the bestselling novel The Accidental Diva and penned two YA novels: It Chicks and Sixteen Candles; her novel The Perfect Find will be adapted into a film starring Gabrielle Union. Her New York Times bestseller Seven Days in June (Grand Central Publishing) is a story of love found, love lost, and love found again. Maybe. Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning novelist. When they meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising buried traumas. No one knows that 15 years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be now pretending not to know each other, but they can’t deny their chemistry – or the fact that they’ve been secretly writing to each other in their books through the years. Over the next seven days, the two reconnect, but a weary Eva wants him gone so her life can return to normal. Before that happens, though, she needs a few questions answered.

Tomi Obaro is a senior culture editor at BuzzFeed News. Her cultural criticism and essays have been published in BuzzFeed News, The Morning News, and The Toast. In her debut book, Dele Weds Destiny: A Novel (Knopf), three once-inseparable friends reunite in Lagos, Nigeria, for the first time in 30 years. They met at university and, despite their differences, became friends for life. Funmi is beautiful, brash, and determined. Enitan is homely and eager, seeking escape from her single mother’s smothering and needy love. Zainab is elegant and reserved, raised by her father’s first two wives after her mother’s death in childbirth. Their friendship is complicated, crisscrossed by love and losses. The old friends, now wives and mothers, are reuniting because Funmi’s daughter, Destiny, is getting married. Hosting the weekend with her wealthy husband, Funmi wants everything to go perfectly. But as the big day approaches, it becomes clear that something is not right. The complexities of their friendship – and the wisdom each has earned – come to bear on a riveting, heartrending moment.