ASU Book Group: ‘Visiting Composer’ by Andrea Avery

The ASU Book Group's March 2026 reading selection is the novella “Visiting Composer” by fiction writer and memoirist Andrea Avery, an ASU graduate (BA music ’00, MFA creative writing ’03, and EdD leadership and innovation ’17).

The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly this spring from noon to 1 p.m.

Haven't read the book? Come anyway! Authors are always present.

Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Miami University Press Novella Prize, “Visiting Composer” is “a brief trip out of time” featuring two 19-year-old women who both want to be composers. One of them, Gloria Clifford, lives in Baltimore in 1910. But after falling down a staircase and hitting her head, she crash-lands in Enid Bluff’s music theory class in Arizona … in 1996. What follows is a story about friendship, the struggle to be both a woman and an artist, and those imbalances of power which end up repeating like unfortunate refrains, time and again.

About the book group

The ASU Book Group meetings and selections for spring 2026 are:

• Feb. 26 - “I Will Die in a Foreign Land” by Kalani Pickhart
• Mar. 26 - “Visiting Composer” by Andrea Avery
• Apr. 23 - “Climate Imagination” edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative hosted in partnership between the Department of English and ASU Library.