In Conversation: Bishop Brian Cole and Jamie Quatro
September 20 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Free
The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee and Union Ave Books are excited to present Bishop Brian Cole in conversation with Jamie Quatro, author of Two-Step Devil and East Tennessee Episcopalian, at Church of the Ascension on Friday, September 20, at 7:00 PM. This event is free of charge. Please RSVP here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. A new novel, Two-Step Devil, is forthcoming from Grove Press in September 2024, to be followed by a story collection, Next Time I’ll Be Louder.
A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, she is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France, where she will be in residence in the spring of 2025. Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures.
In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.
Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.