Friday, January 16, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 In a collection of linked tales filled with irony, humor, and magic, _Talking with Boys_ introduces an unforgettable cast of characters in the Pakistani diaspora in Houston navigating crises of their own making and beyond their control. Via generations and geographies, the stories expand from Houston into tales from the characters’ pasts in Dubai and Lahore. A community of Pakistani immigrants 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 a jinxed bracelet. Throughout, Tayyba Kanwal’s remarkable characters navigate economic upheavals, political turmoil, and personal betrayals to pursue love, plot for survival, and play subtle power games to triumph against patriarchal forces of all genders. **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 Literary 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. **Sonali Kolhatkar** is an award winning multimedia journalist and host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, a TV/radio program that airs on community radio stations all over the nation and on Free Speech TV as well as podcast platforms. She is the author of several nonfiction books including Talking About Abolition: A Police Free World is Possible (Seven Stories, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023). She is a monthly columnist at Independent Media Institute, OtherWords, and Truthout. Her first novel, Queen of Aarohi will be published in 2027 by Red Hen Press. Find out more about her work at [risingupwithsonali.com](http://risingupwithsonali.com/) and [sonalikolhatkar.com](http://sonalikolhatkar.com/).