The Doomed Séance

An Evening of Terrifying Tales

New Orleans authors Alex Jennings, Ladee Hubbard, and Jon Padgett read their most macabre manuscripts in this special Halloween event with music by Lola Jean Darling. Costumes encouraged.

Dress up in your in your most ghoulish garb and get into the Halloween spirit at this spooky storytelling event featuring three New Orleans authors and two-sentence horror stories written by Library patrons. Submit your two-sentence story via Biblioboard.

Enjoy creepy curiosities including the following:

• Musical interludes by Lola Jean Darling
• Readings of terrifying tales by Alex Jennings, Ladee Hubbard, and Jon Padgett
• Raffle with a chance to win a deck of Tarot cards
• Book sale and signing with the authors

Alex Jennings is a writer, editor, teacher, and poet living in New Orleans. He is the Program Director of DreamFoundry’s Con or Bust and pens a regular speculative poetry review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called “Chapter and Verse.” His writing has appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Electric Velocipede, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, New Suns, and Current Affairs, among others. His debut novel, The Ballad of Perilous Graves, was released in 2022. 

Ladee Hubbard is the author of two novels. The Talented Ribkins received the 2017 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. The Rib King was named one of the 100 Must-Read of 2021 by Time Magazine. The Last Suspicious Holdout, her collection of short stories, was published in 2022 and was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her short fiction and essays have been published in Arkansas International, Guernica, Oxford American, and The New York Times, among other publications. She is a recipient of The Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award. She lives in New Orleans.

Jon Padgett is a professional–though lapsed–ventriloquist who lives in New Orleans. He is the Editor-In-Chief of Grimscribe Press, which publishes Vastarien: A Literary Journal, a source of critical study and creative response to the work of Thomas Ligotti. Padgett’s first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine.

Lola Jean Darling is an artist and musician from the Pearl River Reservation in Mississippi. She now resides in her ancestral lands of Bulbancha (New Orleans) where she guides walks in the French Quarter covering indigenous history. You can also find her at the Frenchmen Art Bazaar on the weekends selling her unique art and jewelry. 

Sponsored by the Friends of the New Orleans Public Library.

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