Mark Yakich and Laura Ellen Scott read at Antenna Gallery Oct. 27

Mark Yakich will celebrate the launch of his novel A Meaning for Wife as part of Room 220’s Live Prose at the Antenna Gallery reading series at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 27, along with Ig Publishing press-mate Laura Ellen Scott, author of Death Wishing.

Mark Yakich is a poet and an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. His book Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross was Penguin’s selection for the 2003 National Poetry Series. Penguin Poets also published The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine. Another collection, The Making of Collateral Beauty, won the Snowbound Chapbook Award. In 2008, Press Street published Yakich’s Green Zone New Orleans. He recently won a Fulbright Scholarship to teach in Lisbon, Portugal. A Meaning for Wife is his first novel.

Laura Ellen Scott’s new novel, Death Wishing, is a fantastical account of a burgeoning cape and corset maker in New Orleans whose ability to kill cats and conjure Elvis (vintage 1968) with his wishes proves more troublesome than one might imagine. Scott divides her time between the suburbs of northern Virginia and the mountains of the West Virginia panhandle. She teaches at George Mason University.