Join us for a holiday book signing! Memoirist Lauren Rhoades will also be signing her debut Split the Baby during that hour. If you're not in town, I can personalize a copy for you and have it shipped.

Writing takes both time and brain space. So does caring for children—and while, as any parent-writer will tell you, finding balance can feel impossible, spending time with kids can also yield surprising discoveries and writerly obsessions, even for those who aren’t writing about children. Panelists will share their experiences finding fruitful new subject matter through interactions with children and offer strategies for staying attuned to potential material (and making time to write it down).

The body is home and oracle. To unsilence the body is inherently subversive. To give the body a voice is a revolution. Come join us to write toward the insights that only the body could reveal.

We will bring together survivor mothers who are interested in reflecting and exploring the complexities of parenting, the opportunities of trauma healing, and how we may access a more embodied sense of empowerment within the landscape of our own shapes and with the tether of community.  

Join us for a free reading and talk on Proud Flesh with the theme "Matrilineal Milagros: Our Mothers' Wounds and Miracles".

Within the complexity of broken places—wounded bodies, fractured families, divided communities—these memoirists trace journeys toward integration and healing, revealing how we reconstruct identity from fragments of trauma, love, and resilient hope. Featuring authors: Ellen Ann Fentress (moderator), Catherine Simone Gray, Adam Gussow, Lauren Rhoades, and Victoria Bynum.

An invitation to dip into intimate space with your writing for seven days. We’ll perch at varied vantage points to be with the mystery of where our pleasure, our nourishment, and our life-heat are moving in our days (and nights). We’ll lean toward the sensory world and the weird whispers as we slow down to notice what’s alive in you this season as the world serves heat and grief abounds. One foot in pleasure here.

In this writing workshop for parents, caregivers, and friends, we will seek inspiration from the Mississippi River, full of ever-changing twists and loops. What can the River’s pathways across time teach us about our own journeys of care and who we are in this season? Children are invited to join the session and will have their own craft activity.

How do you receive pleasure? How do you seek it? What do you 'allow' yourself in hard times? Where are your barriers, where are your openings? How does language inform your orientation?

Join Catherine for a writing workshop for mothers and caregivers. This program, funded by the Mississippi Arts Commission, is offered in partnership with The Mississippi Museum of Art, Jxn Motherhood, and the Mississippi Public Health Institute.

Join us for a reading and writing workshop with Catherine Simone Gray as part of the Columbus-Lowndes Library local program called "Writing to Heal".

Proud Flesh is the March Bottom Reader Book Club pick for Rooted Magazine. Join us for a conversation between Catherine and Lauren Rhoades, founder of the magazine, and bring your own questions.

Join us for a reading and conversation between Catherine and Beth Ann Fennelly, the esteemed former Poet Laureate of Mississippi and author of Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother.

Join us for The Visiting Writer Series at Millsaps College for a conversation between Catherine and Kate Royals, Mississippi Today's Community Health Editor.

Join us for a conversation between Catherine and Molly Boeder of The Breathe Network, a nonprofit that supports sexual assault survivors with trauma-informed, sliding-scale healing resources.

It's the Proud Flesh hometown launch celebration! Join us for a signing that begins at 4:30 p.m. A conversation between Catherine and Lauren Rhoades of Rooted will begin at 5:30 p.m. Come get a signed book and some fun Proud Flesh swag.

launch event

A conversation between Catherine and Joelle Hann of Brooklyn Book Doctor, who was Catherine's book coach and developmental editor of Proud Flesh.

Catherine will be in conversation with author Beth Kander about Beth's USA Today Bestselling novel I Made It Out of Clay.