Book Launch Event: WOLF ACT by AJ Romriel

The event is free and will be hosted by Stonewall Columbus on February 21, 2025 at 6:30pm EST (doors open at 6pm). The evening will include a reading, discussion, and signing, and Elissa Washuta (author of White Magic) will join in conversation. It would be wonderful to see you there!

Prologue Bookshop will be there to sell copies of the book throughout the evening, but if you would like to purchase a copy of the book beforehand, it is available for preorder through UW Press and Prologue Bookshop, as well as the usual channels: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Thriftbooks, etc. Please feel free to share this event with any other interested students and faculty.

Date/Time: February 21, 2025 @ 6:30pm EST

Location: Stonewall Columbus (corner of 4th Avenue and High Street)

1160 North High Street

Columbus, OH 43201

As a child, AJ Romriell strove to obey his Mormon leader’s every rule. If he was faithful enough, he was taught, God would remove temptations. But at nineteen, returning home early from his mission after admitting his attraction to men, he was forced to make a decision: either stay the course or work to accept himself fully and risk losing family, community, and the church he’d devoted his life to. His decision to pursue radical acceptance would turn out to be just one step toward reclaiming his life.

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Through linked personal essays crafted in lyric, fabulist, and fragmented forms, Wolf Act charts a young man’s transformation. Weaving together wolfish fairy tales and mythology, Mormon theology and practice, piercings and tattoos, cave explorations, ghost stories, and more, Romriell explores a childhood of hiding, a familial reckoning, a religious exodus, and an effort to understand one’s life as worth saving–even when the meaning of the word “saving” must be reimagined.

AJ Romriell is the author of Wolf Act (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), a memoir that earned first prize in the 2021 Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist in the Writers League of Texas Manuscript Contest. A recipient of the Vandewater Poetry Prize, the Kenneth W. Brewer Creative Writing Award, the Ralph Jennings Smith Creative Writing Endowment, and Pushcart nominations in both poetry and creative nonfiction, his essays, stories, and poems have been featured in Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, and elsewhere. His work has also been shortlisted for Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, CRAFT’s Hybrid Writing Contest, and the Black Warrior Review and New Ohio Review contests for creative nonfiction. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, he is now a Presidential Fellow at The Ohio State University where he writes about queerness, fairy tales, video games, apocalypse narratives, HIV, and more.

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. Her essay collection White Magic was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Open Book Award, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award, and named among the best books of 2021 by TIME, the New York Public Library, and NPR. She is the author of My Body Is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode, and with Theresa Warburton, she co-edited the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. Elissa’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Creative Capital award, and the Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. She is an associate professor at the Ohio State University, where she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.