Join Deep Vellum for an evening of readings on the occasion of Kristi D. Osorio’s cultural critique memoir publication, The Sound of Burning: A Mother, a Daughter, a Murder.
Osorio will be joined by poet Mag Gabbert and writer Daniel Peña for a night of readings that burn.
The Sound of Burning: A Mother, a Daughter, a Murder begins the night then-fifteen-year-old Osorio’s mother murdered her grandmother while the author was in her bedroom down the hall. But this book is not simply about that crime. Instead, Osorio examines the true crime obsession that arose in popular American culture parallel to her life, from the Scream franchise and the early 2000s “copaganda” to the more recent podcast boom. She uses her own story to interrogate the ways that true crime narratives often dehumanize the very real people at the center of those stories. Part memoir, part cultural critique, Osorio brings together memory, the lyric, and archival materials to tell her story of coming of age in the shadows of violence.
Kristi D. Osorio is the author of The Sound of Burning: a Mother, a Daughter, a Murder (University of Georgia Press, 2026). She is the winner of the 2023 Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize selected by Camonghne Felix and the Sonora Review "Mercy" Contest in Nonfiction selected by Maggie Nelson. Her writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from Columbia University, Wesleyan University, and the Kenyon Review. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Texas Tech University.
Mag Gabbert is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, which won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and the Writer’s League of Texas Book Award in Poetry; the chapbook The Breakup, which won the Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems . Her work can also be found in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, Poetry Daily, and in many other journals and magazines. Mag is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Idyllwild Arts. She has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech, and she currently teaches at Southern Methodist University and serves as Poet Laureate of Dallas, Texas.
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor of Creative Writing. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His debut collection of essays, HOW TO LOOK AWAY is out now from One World books. He splits his time between Dallas, Mexico City, and a tiny farm in Germany.