Author Event: Steff Sirois and Emily Costa

Join us in the ReRead bookstore on Sunday, April 26 at 2 pm for an afternoon of reading and conversation with local authors and Ball & Socket Writers’ Factory instructors Steff Sirois and Emily Costa. Listen to them share their latest work and discuss what drives their writing, followed by a Q&A and book signing! Reserve your free spot at this link!

Mary’s Hand is Ants by Steff Sirois

In Mary’s Hand is Ants, Steff Sirois delivers a macabre collection of short prose and hybrid works that grapples with meaning making and meaninglessness. Each piece explores hopelessness and fear through absurd performances that attempt to answer unanswerable questions or surrender to the absence of answers entirely. From a girl sewing on her own finger to a ghost baby’s manipulations, Sirois crafts scenes as chilling as they are surreal. In the unforgettable title story, a school violin performance for Shania Twain becomes a quiet eulogy for a girl eaten alive by ants. The horror lives in silence, guilt, and memory.

Girl on Girl by Emily Costa

What happens when you peak in high school, or maybe earlier, or maybe not at all? When you hate your friends, or love them too much? When the warmth of nostalgia starts to slowly poison you? In Girl on Girl, Emily Costa explores desperation and loneliness, screen obsession, and casual cruelty as characters—mostly women and girls—struggle to be seen.

Steff Sirois is a writer from Cheshire, Connecticut who loves genre-fluid prose that rejects intellectualism, leans into the absurd, and bleeds out all over the page. She earned her M.F.A rom the University of Idaho, where she became obsessed with the Gothic and writing very long sentences. She currently teaches composition at Fairfield University and creative writing workshops at Ball and Socket. Her short story collection, Mary’s Hand is Ants, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025. Find some of her other work linked at steffsirois.com.

Emily Costa is a writer from Waterbury, Connecticut. She received her MFA in fiction from Southern Connecticut State University, where she teaches first-year composition. Her collection of short stories, Girl on Girl, is out now from Rejection Letters. Until It Feels Right, a collection of diary entries chronicling her experience with intensive CBT for obsessive-compulsive disorder, is out now from Autofocus Books. She is the Creative Nonfiction editor for Farewell Transmission and assistant flash editor for Split Lip Magazine. Emily also writes a semi-regular essay newsletter called LISTLESS with her sister on Substack. You can find her online at emilylauracosta.com.