Andrew Porter & Andrew Bertaina

Join us as Andrew Porter (The Imagined Life) and Andrew Bertaina (Ethan Hawke & Me) give a reading and discuss their new books. Pick your favorite Andrew and ask him questions in the Q&A. Both authors' books will be available for purchase. 

About The Imagined Life: Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy. As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents’ legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father’s past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life. Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one’s parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son.

ANDREW PORTER is the author of four books, including the story collections The Disappeared (Knopf) and The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage) and the novels In Between Days (Knopf) and The Imagined Life (Knopf, 2025). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, and on Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

When Andrew Bertaina first saw the 1995 Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy film Before Sunrise—swiping the tape from his sister’s bedroom—he was fifteen, painfully shy, and living a sheltered existence in small-town California. The movie cracked something open in him, with its romantic European setting and its charming, intelligent protagonists, who fall in love with each other over the course of a day spent wandering the streets of Vienna. Within the movie’s story seemed to lie  a promise: that you could truly be known by another person, that a relationship could be a never-ending conversation with someone who was both interested and interesting.  Fast-forward 25 years, and Andrew’s teenaged romanticism has been challenged by life’s realities, which have included a marriage, a child, a move across the country, a divorce. Meanwhile, the film’s central relationship has also been challenged and complicated by two sequels. When Andrew decides to revisit the first film, with a new partner and a bottle of wine—a rare date night for two single parents—he can’t help but wonder: Will he still see himself in the movie? And, perhaps more importantly, will she? 

About the Author: Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), the book length essay, Ethan Hawke & Me (Barrelhouse, 2025), and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021). His work has appeared in The ThreePenny Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Microfiction, and listed as notable in three editions of The Best American Essays and as a special mention in The Pushcart Prize anthology. He has an MFA from American University and more of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com