Dialogue: Grotto Nights at the Library

This month's Grotto Night features writers and filmmakers Amy Shea, David Munro and Ariel Gore who will speak on the theme: To Live & Die in the United States: A Struggle for Agency, Dignity, and Grace

The event will include the screening of a short film, Stitch & Time, about a prison club that crochets comfort items for fellow inmates in hospice.

Amy Shea is an essayist and the author of Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins (Rutgers University Press, to be released September 2025). Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Pangyrus, Portland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Spry Literary Journal, Fat City Review, From Glasgow to Saturn, & the Journal of Sociology of Health & Illness. She works as the Writing Program Director for Mount Tamalpais College, a free community college for the incarcerated people of San Quentin. Learn more about her work at https://amysshea.com.

David Munro is a filmmaker and founder of The Unscripted Company, where he develops and produces story-forward projects across fiction and nonfiction. His documentary Stand Up Planet profiles a new generation of global comedians sparking social change. It received the highest score ever awarded by the Center for Media & Social Impact. David’s indie comedy Full Grown Men, starring Amy Sedaris, Alan Cumming, and Debbie Harry, won the Sundance Channel Audience Award and was a critic’s pick in New York Magazine, LA Weekly, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His short films have screened at festivals from Sundance to Berlin, earning him a spot on Filmmaker Magazine’s list of “25 New Indie Faces.”

Ariel Gore is an aspiring magician conducting writing experiments in hopes of transmuting taboo and hard and joyful things like teen motherhood and terminal cancer and queer love and hexing the patriarchy into an elixir that will save the world. She’s the LAMBDA-Award winning author of 13 books of fiction and non-fiction. Her latest book is Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer.