Join Sunu P. Chandy, Jody Hobbs Hesler, and Jeffrey Dale Lofton for a reading and discussion at The Potter’s House.

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist including through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney.  She’s the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, a queer woman of color, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Her award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House in 2023. Sunu’s work can also be found in publications including Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu is also currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward, and has worked for over 20 years as a civil rights attorney, most recently as the Legal Director of the National Women’s Law Center. Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and later, her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queens College/The City University of New York in 2013.  Sunu is on the board of the Transgender Law Center, and was included as one the 2021 Queer Women of Washington. Sunu is delighted to celebrate her collection, My Dear Comrades, with all of you and with the book's fabulous cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.

Jody Hobbs Hesler has written ever since she could hold a pencil and now lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Growing up, she split time between suburban Richmond, Virginia, and the mountains outside Winchester, Virginia. Experiences of all these regions flavor her writing. Her debut story collection, What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better was published by Cornerstone Press in October 2023, and her debut novel, Without You Here is forthcoming from Flexible Press in November 2024. Jody teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia and reads for The Los Angeles Review.

Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia and has called the nation’s capital home for over three decades. A former actor, Jeffrey is currently a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, where he's surrounded by books and people who love books—in short, paradise. Red Clay Suzie is his first novel, a fictionalized memoir written through his personal lens growing up a gay, physically misshapen outsider in a conservative family and community in the Deep South. Red Clay Suzie was longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize.