Due to an unforeseen health issue, Samantha Irby will not be able to appear at the Book Festival. Jenny Lawson will still appear as scheduled. Please send any questions to shop@midtownscholar.com.

The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to host #1 New York Times bestselling authors Samantha Irby, Jenny Lawson, and Kate Baer for a conversation and signing on their new books, Quietly Hostile (Irby), Broken (in the best possible way) (Lawson), and And Yet (Baer).

This event is free and open to the public; no registration required. Seating is general admission; first come, first served. A book signing will immediately follow the conversation. Purchase of an author’s new book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line.

About the Books:

Samantha Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts. In Quietly Hostile, she takes us on an outrageously funny tour of all the gory details that make up the true portrait of a life behind the screenshotted depression memes. Relatable, poignant, and uproarious, once again, Irby is the tonic we all need to get by.

As Jenny Lawson’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken, she brings readers along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way. A beacon of hope and a wellspring of laughter when we all need it most, Broken is honest, unflinching, and brilliantly hilarious.

Kate Baer’s second full-length book of traditional poetry, And Yet, dives deeper into the themes that are the hallmarks of her writing: motherhood, friendship, love, and loss. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the remarkable evolution of a writer and an artist working at the height of her craft, pushing herself and her poetry in a beautiful and impressive way. Intimate, evocative, and bold, Kate’s beguiling poetry firmly positions her in the company of Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Maggie Nelson, and other great female poets of our time.

About the Authors:

Samantha Irby is a writer whose work you can find on the internet.

Jenny Lawson is an award-winning humorist known for her great candor in sharing her struggle with mental illness. She lives in Texas with her husband and daughter and was constantly “buying too many books” (“Not a real thing,” she insists), so she decided to skip the middleman and just started her own bookshop, which also serves booze because books and booze are what magic is made of. She has previously written Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy, both of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. She also wrote You Are Here, which inexplicably made it onto the New York Times bestseller list in spite of the fact that it was basically a very fun coloring book. She would like to be your friend unless you’re a real asshole. And yes, she realizes that this whole paragraph is precisely the reason she shouldn’t be allowed to write her own bio.

Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.