Authors Try Their Hands at Bookselling for a Day

Ever wonder what would happen if a bunch of well-known authors invaded your favorite indie bookstore?

This past weekend, patrons around the country saw it happen. Sherman Alexie’s “Indies First” project successfully launched with writers around the nation volunteering at local independent booksellers, meeting with readers, selling books, and, in the case of children’s book author Bob Shea, cleaning out bookstore refrigerators.

Authors participating in “Indies First” included Alexie, James Patterson, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Kim Dower, among others. More “Indies First” dates are planned for the future.

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Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) and a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry. The recipient of a Levis Reading Prize and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Kaveh is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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