Rita Bullwinkel

The Book Catapult is proud to welcome back acclaimed author Rita Bullwinkel for her new novel, Headshot on Saturday, March 30 at 7pm! Rita will be in-conversation with her sister, Audrey Bullwinkel. Also reading that evening will be local authors Lily Hoàng and Jac Jemc!

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win. Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. The winner of a 2022 Whiting Award, she is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s, the Deputy Editor of The Believer, a Contributing Editor at NOON, and an Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building.