Bookmark It welcomes Paul Harding to The Gallery at Avalon Island on May 26th beginning at 7:30 p.m. for an Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist Outreach program with a reading, followed by Q & A and book signing. Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family, Enon (Random House, 2013) and Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN American Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. In an interview with Publishers Weekly about his work, Harding has said that he is “interested in the greater whole of which we are a part, but cannot perceive. That makes death an interesting threshold. It fascinates me in the context of our mortality.”

In the final Friday of National Short Story Month, Bookmark It (3201 Corrine Drive Orlando, Florida 32803) will host David James Poissant at a wine and sign for his book, The Heaven of Animals from 6pm-8pm, May 29.

In each of the stories in this remarkable debut, award-winning writer David James Poissant explores the tenuous bonds of family—fathers and sons, husbands and wives—as they are tested by the sometimes brutal power of love. His strikingly true-to-life characters have reached a precipice, chased there by troubles of their own making. Standing at the brink, each must make a choice: Leap, or look away? Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin writes that Poissant forces us “to face the people we are when we’re alone in the dark.”

Starting at 7pm, May 19^th, at APEX at East End Market, (3201 Corrine Drive, Orlando, FL) Bookmark It is honored to host Shannon Miller, former Olympic gymnast, tireless women and children’s health advocate (Shannon Miller Lifestyle and Foundation) and now author as she tours the country with the release of her memoir It’s Not About Perfect: Competing for My Country and Fighting for My Life, as the first of four authors that will appear at Bookmark It in May.

Shannon’s story is one of grit, perseverance, and faith. In it Miller tells the unlikely story of a shy girl from Oklahoma becoming an international phenomenon, and takes us behind the scenes of some of the most memorable moments in U.S. Olympic history. She then tackles an even greater challenge, her health, when in 2011—at 33 years old and a new mother—Miller was diagnosed with a malignant germ cell tumor, a rare form of ovarian cancer.  Her story of trial, triumph and life after cancer reminds us all that its life’s bumps and bruises that reveal our character.