Jacob Budenz "Tea Leaves" with Christine Ferrera

Jacob Budenz will be at The Book Cellar to celebrate their new book, Tea Leaves, with conversation partner Christine Ferrera!

About the Book:

Tea Leaves presents 17 speculative short stories that place queer characters in larger-than-life situations to emphasize the surreal experience of marginalization. A queer romance spans multiple incarnations, but only in doomed cities. A gay medieval scholar must testify for his life to the otherworldly octopus who traps him in a cafe bathroom. Ignoring their better judgment, a witch brings their mortal partner on a hunt for a dangerous sorcerer and must cope with the dire consequences. 

Each of the stories within Tea Leaves explores the urgency of modern queer life in encounters between the otherworldly and the queer other. In juxtaposing queer narratives with new, larger-than-life myths, Tea Leaves both exalts and lampoons the queer experience while examining the sometimes surreal obstacles of marginalization.

About the Author:

 Jacob Budenz is a queer author, multi-disciplinary performer, and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins whose work focuses broadly on the intersections of queerness and the otherworldly. The author of Tea Leaves (Amble, an imprint of Bywater Books, 2023) and Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens Press 2018), Budenz has fiction and poetry in print journals including Slipstream and Assaracus, online publications including Taco Bell Quarterly, Wussy Mag, and Entropy, and anthologies by Mason Jar Press and Unbound Edition, among others. Jake received the Baker Innovative Projets Grant for Simaetha: a Dreambaby Cabaret in 2019 and appeared on Baltimore City Paper's Top Ten Staged Productions of 2016 for writing and directing an original adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and you can follow them on Instagram (@dreambabyjake) or visit their website (www.jakebeearts.com) to stay up-to-date on their work.

About the Conversation Partner:

Christine Ferrera creates work in performance, video and painting that explores the intersection of art and comedy. Occupying a unique place in the span of feminist art, her intimate stories begin with a familiar experience and gradually veer into liminal and unpredictable terrain, revealing their emotional core. Ferrera's work has been presented at festivals internationally and centers around themes of feminism, capitalism, existential anxiety, and self-sabotage. She has appeared on NPR's The Story and The Signal and was a featured solo performer in the 2014 Amsterdam Fringe Festival. Ferrera has received many awards, including a 2007 artist residency at the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, a 2013 Maryland State Arts Council Award, a 2019 Creativity Grant and a 2020 Emergency Relief Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.