Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Book Soup, West Hollywood
Outliving Michael is a memorial memoir in poetry, chronicling Steven Reigns’s profound friendship with Michael Church, who died of AIDS in 2000. Through vignettes and tender reflections, Reigns traces their intergenerational bond, a connection of mentorship, shared artistic pursuits, and the quiet acts of devotion that shaped their lives as gay men in the 1990s. This deeply personal collection becomes both an elegy and an archive, honoring the countless roles played by a generation lost to AIDS: lover, sibling, parent, friend. Reigns preserves the texture of their companionship with unflinching honesty and lyricism, illuminating how certain people leave an indelible mark long after they are gone. Outliving Michael is a testament to friendship’s power to sustain, transform, and survive even death itself. Praise for Outliving Michael: A moving elegy for a gay young/beloved/friend and a tribute to his life. —John Rechy, City of Night A disarmingly honest portrait in poems that reads like a promise between companions departed, here, and yet to arrive. —Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar, Deep House For those of us who have lost people we love—a love that is powered by the lack of love we find in our families—Outliving Michael has renewed my own lost loves with a vividness that makes the past present. Steven Reigns has indeed outlived Michael, but not, in this funny, elegant requiem, outlived his love for Michael." \--Paula Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz, Mother Play Reigns has built a man from torn scraps of a life, a friendship, a bond. A portrait, a collage, of Michael, of the devastation of AIDS, of aftermath. Love and death, they say, is all you need to make poetry. And memory. I cried, for Michael, for myself, for everyone I have ever loved. \--Dorianne Laux , Only As the Day is Long, Life on Earth Reigns writes about the enormity of love and loss of a deep friendship. When we’re present with one another, we have everything we need. The writing here is so alive —Natalie Goldberg, Three Simple Lines, Writing on Empty