Authors Tracey Levine & Grady Chambers in Conversation

Join Philly-based writers Tracey Levine (“At the Diner in Heaven”) and Grady Chambers (“Great Disasters”) for a reading & discussion.

About the Event:

Join us on Tuesday, April 7 at 7 PM where authors Tracey Levine and Grady Chambers will read from their work and discuss their craft. Tracey and Grady’s books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Registration on Eventbrite is highly recommended! Tickets are free or pay-what-you-want.

Questions? Email events@theheadandthehand.com.

About the Books:

At The Diner in Heaven, they’re serving up Bubbie’s chicken soup, cigs, abandoned malls, roller skates, Tastycakes, 7-11s, exes, homemade bullets, and the feeling of constantly being angled by boys, some of them pretending to be men. Levine’s crisp, intimate prose is—much like an Edward Hopper painting—saturated with loneliness and suggestion. These stories feel like sharing fries with a friend at midnight, leaning in for the whispered secret that will change you both. – Annie Liontas, Sex With a Brain Injury

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In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year―as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country―the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?

Exploring the beauty, hope, and humor that can be found even in moments of deep loneliness and devastation, Grady Chambers’ Great Disasters moves between memories of high school and early adulthood to consider friendship, first love, patriotism, protest, addiction, and more. An exquisitely written, profoundly moving debut novel, Great Disasters is an intimate portrait of disasters big and small, personal and political―and the ways the two are intertwined―and the announcement of a stunning new voice in American fiction.

About the Authors:

Tracey Levine grew up in northeast Philadelphia and teaches creative writing and film courses at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA where she coordinates the creative writing program for undergraduates. Her creative writing work has appeared in many journals such as Crack the Spine, Streetlight Voices, the anthology Broken Skyline, she has a chapbook with The Head and The Hand Press, and was included in Best Stories of Philadelphia from Toho publishing in 2021. She is the creator and former co-host of the Philadelphia reading series The Hatchery. She is also a dedicated yogi and yoga instructor who plays competitive darts.

Grady Chambers is the author of the novel GREAT DISASTERS (Tin House, 2025) and the poetry collection NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS (Milkweed Books, 2018), selected by Henri Cole as the winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems and stories can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, The Sun, Joyland, Image, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow. He attended the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, and lives in Philadelphia.