In April, Deesha Philyaw gave a reading that in many ways felt like any other. The multipurpose room where the event took place was large and open, and some fifteen attendees clustered in a semicircle, wearing shirts and jeans in various neutral colors and blue. Philyaw read from her Story Prize– winning collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, as she has on numerous occasions since it was published by West Virginia University Press in 2020. Then she answered questions about craft—where to find story ideas, how to handle writer’s block, and the challenges of writing about other people, especially those who haven’t been kind to you.
But Philyaw was not in the usual bookstore
