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Aimee Pokwatka

@aimeepokwatka.bsky.social

190 followers 430 following 120 posts

Author of the novels SELF-PORTRAIT WITH NOTHING (2022), THE PARLIAMENT (2024), and ACCUMULATION (forthcoming 2026) (she/her) www.aimeepokwatka.com You can preorder signed copies of ACCUMULATION here: https://www.bedfordbooks.shop/accumulation

www.bedfordbooks.shop

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Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · Aug 16

Some *news*: I wrote a haunted house book about suicidal ideation, the horrors of modern motherhood and the mental load, and the creepy doll we found in our yard, and I’m OVER THE DANG MOON to be working on it with Daphne Durham at Putnam.

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Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · 6h

As if I needed another reason to love librarians: yesterday my 8th grader, who's on a Stephen King kick, came home to report that the librarian at his middle school went to the high school library specifically to procure a copy of Pet Sematary for him.

Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · 1d

When I was in college, I took a biotechnology seminar (this was 98/99?) and was made to read The Double Helix, memoir of nightmare racist/misogynist geneticist James Watson. JUSTICE for Rosalind Franklin, FUCK James Watson forever; I will FOREVER be furious I had to read his stupid, sexist book.

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Maris Kreizman @maris.bsky.social · Sep 10

Be the Booksmith you want to see in the world. sfstandard.com/2025/06/26/s...

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Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · Sep 5

oooh 😍

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Jess Zimmerman @jesszimmerman.com · Sep 2

For a while I naively thought children dying was just something the right wing was willing to accept. But it’s become unavoidably clear that it’s an active goal.

Mike Baker @mikebaker.bsky.social · Sep 2

Teens calling Idaho's suicide hotline are being told they can't proceed with the conversation without parental consent. Many of the callers are then hanging up.

Idaho approved a strict parental consent law last year.

idahocapitalsun.com/2025/08/29/i...

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Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · Aug 30

literal lol

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emily moonlight @threnody.bsky.social · Aug 28

if you want a place to channel your energy that isn’t raw panic?

you live somewhere with a schoolboard.

find all of its members’ emails. it isn’t hard.

find out their plans to deal with this. demand they ignore it. almost no one ever does even this much & you can legit make a difference.

States must ax transgender references from sex ed or risk losing funds, Trump admin says

The mandate comes just days after the Trump administration terminated funding for a sex education program in California.

www.nbcnews.com

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Hannah Vardit @hannahvardit.bsky.social · Aug 16

hi this is my favorite writing advice, it's from former simpsons writer john swartzwelder (i think about the crappy little elf all the time) www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

screengrab of a portion of new yorker interview with former simpson's writer john swartzwelder:
Mike Sacks: How much time and attention did you spend on these scripts? Another “Simpsons” writer once compared your scripts to finely tuned machines—if the wrong person mucked with them, the whole thing could blow up.
Swartzwelder: All of my time and all of my attention. It’s the only way I know how to write, darn it. But I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

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ℳatt @matttomic.bsky.social · Aug 15

This video from Fairmount Bagels in Montreal from their Instagram is the most impressive thing I've ever seen

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Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · Aug 6

OBSESSED.

Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · Aug 4

If you're a fan of surrealist film, weirdo animation, or feminist art, do yourself a favor and watch the films of Suzan Pitt on @criterionchannl.bsky.social. They're gloriously outlandish, filled with stunning visuals and evocative moments. Really great stuff!

Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · Aug 6

Dug into these tonight, and I'm so grateful for this recommendation! Gobsmacking!

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · Jul 31

My wife is in Vogue shitting on your AI-generated "art" 💜 www.vogue.com/article/matt...

Well, everything. The death of art. [Laughs.] A thing that I’ve been struck by in the last year of tech development around art is that what makes us human is making art, even if you’re not a professional artist. This is kind of corny, but I think about cavemen, right? One of the first things we ever did as a species was put our handprints on a wall, and it’s just this drive that has always been there. It’ll always be there. And I think it’s preposterous that these people are suggesting that they develop this technology, and the first thing they want to eliminate is art, so you have more time to…what, email? I don’t know what they think I’m going to do with my fucking day. Most of the population is not artists, but a lot of the population has artistic hobbies, and if you replace that with a computer doing it for you or whatever, it’s just pointless. I think there’s a death drive in these people, almost, and an actual hatred of artists; they are jealous of people with imagination because they don’t have one, and they almost consciously want to eliminate it.

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Dean Frey @dean.bsky.social · Jul 30

Happy birthday Kate Bush 🎂
📷 Guido Harari, London, 1993

"One secret of Bush’s artistry is that she has never feared the ludicrous - she tries things that other musicians would be too careful or cool to go near."
- Margaret Talbot

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllR...

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Democracy Now! @democracynow.org · Jul 21

Alex de Waal has worked on humanitarian causes across the globe for over 40 years.

“There is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.”

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Amanda Litman @amandalitman.bsky.social · Jul 9

One would hope the obvious fact that a crazy racist billionaire can reprogram an AI bot to also be crazy racist in the blink of an eye will make anyone pause just a sec before they open up any other AI tool and treat it as gospel.

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Dean Frey @dean.bsky.social · Jul 8

For Barbara Morgan's birthday, her most famous photograph: "Kick" 🎂

Martha Graham portrays Emily Dickinson in her ballet "Letter to the World", 1940

Graham leans over, one of her legs high in the air. Her long full dress makes a half-circle.

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Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · Jun 19

Ooh!

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Aimee Pokwatka @aimeepokwatka.bsky.social · Jun 19

True story.

A 7-year-old smiling over his collection of large rocks.

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Nick Stevens @nick-stevens.com · May 19

Casts of Apollo astronaut hands for spacesuit glove construction (1968).

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Brandy Jensen @brandyjensen.bsky.social · May 15

fuck off

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Kate Beaton @katebeaton.bsky.social · May 15

Fuck this, absolutely fuck this, everyone who loves audiobooks loves their favourite narrators because they are great at their jobs and interpreting the author's words and they make the experience what it is www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks

Amazon brand will offer more than 100 artificial intelligence-generated voices in English and other languages

www.theguardian.com

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · May 8

Mike D: Prospect Park down to Park Slope, it’s time to listen to

All 3 Beastie Boys:

Laura Loomer & @LauraLoomer
Replying to @drprevost
WOKE MARXIST POPE

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Celeste Ng @pronounced-ing.bsky.social · Apr 26

Happy Independent Bookstore Day! Read Maris's piece, then go show your local indie bookstore some love. They're so much more than places to get books--they are places to engage with ideas and others in your community. Staffed by actual humans to help you find the books you didn't know you needed!

Maris Kreizman @maris.bsky.social · Apr 24

I needed to write about something that’s giving me hope, so I wrote about Independent Bookstore Day which is this Saturday. lithub.com/something-go...

Something Good in the World: Let’s Celebrate Independent Bookstore Day This Weekend

I was going to write something else for today’s column, something complain-y but righteous that would allow me to get some stuff off my chest and maybe even get some rage clicks. Shit is bad. But I…

lithub.com

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Dave Infante @dinfontay.com · Apr 25

Man, this is a pretty fucking gross move from Amazon, huh? Good on @bookshop.org for not mincing words, though:

Every April, we celebrate Independent Bookstore Day to remind us how vital indie bookstores are to our communities and society. It’s a day of joy and solidarity, and significant financial impact for these bookstores.

This year, Amazon is undercutting that with a “Book Sale” on the same day—a calculated move by a company that has already put half the bookstores in the country out of business, controls over 60% of the market and sells far more books than all indie bookstores combined. The people at Amazon responsible for the timing of their "Book Sale" should be ashamed, but they are shameless.

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Matt Bell @mdbell79.bsky.social · Apr 25

I love this epigraph from Maggie Nelson that opens SHRAPNEL by @lance-olsen.bsky.social.

"The pleasure of realizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again— not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life." —Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

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