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Better Toledo | The Future is Female by Laura Maylene Walter

Laura Maylene Walter discusses how patriarchal influences can cause harm to all people, regardless of gender.

In her debut novel, Body of Stars, Laura Maylene Walter explores female agency in a world where the future is written on women’s bodies, a phenomenon that inspires both awe and unease within the novel’s regressive society. By highlighting her characters’ struggles with purity culture, heteronormativity, the gender binary, and the risk of abduction and assault, Walter will discuss how her fictional creation reflects our own culture—and how patriarchal influences can cause harm to all people, regardless of gender.

This event is part of Better Toledo, a personal and professional development series to ensure “you will do better in Toledo.” Certificates of completion are available to participants who take part in three or more sessions in 2023.

For group registrations please call 419-259-5293.

Laura Maylene Walter is the author of the novel Body of Stars (Dutton, 2021), an Ohioana Book Awards Finalist and a UK Booksellers Association Fiction Book of the Month selection. She has received grants, fellowships, or residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, the Ohio Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Chautauqua Institution, the Ohioana Library Association, and Art Omi: Writers. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, The Sun, Slate, Literary Hub, The Masters Review, Horse Girls (Harper Perennial, 2021), and elsewhere. She is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library, where she hosts Page Count, a literary podcast.