Tayyba Kanwal Author Event - TALKING WITH BOYS

Join us at Lark & Owl Booksellers to celebrate the release of TALKING WITH BOYS by Tayyba Kanwal. Tayyba will be in conversation with local authorJessica Goudeau.

Doors to this event will open at 6:30pm.

ABOUT THE BOOK: A community of Pakistani immigrants in Houston distract ICE with unlikely bait. A housekeeper in a Dubai mansion plots to liberate her fellow indentured workers. In Lahore, an empty-nester finds herself bound by more than the jinxed bracelet her adult son has gifted her. Talking with Boys is a collection of linked stories filled with irony, humor, and magic. Spanning generations and continents—from Lahore to Dubai to Houston—these characters navigate economic upheavals, political turmoil, and personal betrayals. Amid crises both imposed and self-inflicted, the people in these stories pursue love, plot for survival and play subtle power games to triumph against patriarchal forces of all genders.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tayyba Kanwal is a Pakistani-American writer, and editor and author of the short story collection, Talking with Boys (Black Lawrence Press, 2026) She serves as Senior Editor at Conjunctions., and as programming director at the literary arts nonprofit, Inprint, in Houston. Her work appears in journals such as Witness Magazine, Meridian and Gulf Coast Journal, and has won awards including the Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Prize and the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and an MS in Mathematics from the University of Oregon.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR: Jessica Goudeau is the author of After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a Christopher Award, and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. She has been a columnist for Catapult and written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Washington Post, among many other places. She produced short documentaries distributed by Teen Vogue and The New Yorker about young women crossing borders. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Texas and teaches Creative Nonfiction at Wilkes University.