Summer Stewart & Jessica Lynne Henkle on the Brutal Architecture of Love

Tonight, Rosalia Scalia welcomes Jessica Lynne Henkle and Summer Stewart for an evening of conversation centered on grief, womanhood, survival, and the complicated realities that shape our inner lives.

At the center of the event is MOTHER! by Summer Stewart, a genre-defying collection of poetry and essays that examines what it means to become—and continually be remade as—a woman. Moving through girlhood, relationships, labor, motherhood, sexuality, pregnancy, and loss, the collection dismantles the myth that identity is entirely self-authored. Instead, it asks readers to confront the systems, expectations, and silences that shape women long before they ever have language for them.

Blending intimate storytelling with cultural critique, MOTHER! explores the invisible labor women carry inside families, partnerships, institutions, and even their own bodies. Rather than treating motherhood as a singular role, Stewart reframes it as a condition—one that reveals larger truths about autonomy, inheritance, care, power, and survival. The collection does not seek easy redemption. It offers recognition instead: a way of seeing oneself clearly inside structures that often demand disappearance.

Stewart is an award-winning journalist, poet, nonfiction author, and the publisher/managing editor of Unsolicited Press, where she has worked with authors across genres since 2012. Through her Substack, If You Give a Girl a Book, and her work as an editor and mentor, she continues to advocate for fearless, structurally aware literary work that refuses simplification.

Joining Stewart is Jessica Lynne Henkle, whose book Without Your Father chronicles the devastating and disorienting year following the sudden death of her father. Told across 112 vignettes and written in the second person, the book captures the strange rhythms of grief: the absurdity, exhaustion, confusion, tenderness, and persistence required to keep living after profound loss.

Henkle’s work refuses tidy narratives around mourning. Instead, Without Your Father mirrors grief itself—fragmented, repetitive, nonlinear, and deeply physical. The result is an offering that allows readers to move through their own losses in their own ways, finding companionship inside the unbearable.

Together, Stewart and Henkle bring two works into conversation that examine what remains after rupture: after death, after motherhood, after expectation, after the self we thought we were supposed to become. Tonight’s Literary Nights with Unsolicited Press event promises an honest and deeply human discussion about the realities women carry, the stories we inherit, and the language we use to survive them.