June Third Thursday “Never Too Late: Debuting After 50”
June 18 2026 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM CDT
Free
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While we all know the path to publication can be long and winding, the path to the writing life can itself be quite the journey. Rather than seeing career, family, service, and circumstance as roadblocks, perhaps they are necessary stepping stones to finding your voice and your story. With age, comes perspective. With perspective, comes clarity.
For our June Third Thursday, we’ll be joined by three authors—Jennifer Eli Bowen (The Book of Kin), Parul Kapur (Inside the Mirror), and Kalehua Kim (Mele), who have published their first books later in life. We’ll hear all about their journeys to and through the writing life and their debuts, and learn what insights were gleaned along the way. Join us to push back against the trope of the young ingenue and be reaffirmed that it’s okay to take your time.
This conversation will be moderated by WLT Program Director Sarah Renee Beach.
Buy our panelists books and support indie bookstores! You can find our June Third Thursday booklist here.
Featured Presenter(s)
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Jennifer Eli Bowen is the author of THE BOOK OF KIN. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, a Tim McGinnis Award, The Arts and Letters Prize, among others. Her prose can be found in The Sun, Orion, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Jen is the founding director of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, mom of resilient sons, and proud resident of St. Paul's Midway neighborhood where sidewalk poetry takes the place of broken sidewalks. -
Parul Kapur was born in an oil town in India’s northeastern jungle and grew up in Connecticut. Her novel Inside the Mirror, a story of twin sister artists in 1950s Bombay, inspired by her experiences as a reporter in the city, won the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award and the AWP Prize for the Novel, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and New American Voices Award. Parul holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Wascana Review, Midway Journal and more. She spent a decade as a freelance journalist in Germany and France, and has worked as a press officer at the United Nations in New York. Her articles and reviews appear in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, ARTnews, Art in America, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica and The Paris Review. The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hambidge Center, Loghaven Artist Residency and others have awarded her writing fellowships. She lives in Atlanta and is at work on a novel about a young couple in trouble. -
Kalehua Kim is the author of Mele, winner of the inaugural Pasifika Poetry Prize awarded by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association. She was named one of Poets & Writers featured debut poets for 2025 and was a 2023 winner of the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Calyx, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal.
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