Join us at First Light as we welcome Avigayl Sharp back to Austin, a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, celebrating her debut novel Offseason, out this May from Astra House. The event will begin with a reception from 7:00-7:15pm, and the discussion will begin at 7:15pm.

A blisteringly funny and transcendent novel, Offseason follows a young woman who takes a job teaching English literature at an all-girls boarding school in a small coastal town, trying, desperately, to escape the trap that is herself.

At the center is a narrator who is both fiercely observant and deeply self-deluded, moving through lectures that veer from Bleak House to Stalin to inherited histories of violence, while entangling herself with the people around her in ways that are intimate and strange. When she is pulled back to her hometown, the past refuses to stay contained. What begins as a search for clarity turns into something more obsessive, as she tries to pin down where, exactly, her life went wrong.

“To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere—this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit.” —Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow

She will be joined by Deb Olin Unferth for a conversation on writing that resists resolution, the role of humor in difficult material, and the uneasy space between an experience and the stories we tell about it.

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About the Author

Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers here in Austin, and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and fellowships from Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Her writing is drawn to voices that are a little off-balance, a little too aware of themselves, and unwilling to settle into clean narratives. Offseason is her first novel, though it carries the feeling of a voice that has been building pressure for some time.

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About the Conversation Partner

Deb Olin Unferth has spent her career writing at the edges of belief, story, and experience. She is the author of several books across fiction and nonfiction, including Revolution, which traces her time attempting to join a guerrilla movement in Central America, and Barn 8, a novel about an undercover operation inside an industrial egg farm.

Her next novel, Earth 7, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press on June 9, 2026. Set in a near-future where Earth has been reduced almost beyond recognition, the book traces an unlikely love story across artificial shores and oceanic settlements, asking what can endure, and what remains worth saving, even at the edge of collapse.​​

A Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Unferth brings both rigor and openness to the act of reading and conversation. She teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, where she works closely with emerging writers, and is known for asking the kind of questions that shift a room.

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