WVU Press welcomes author Mo Daviau to Morgantown in joint event at WVU’s Colson Hall with author and WVU MFA graduate Kanza Javed
October 2, 2025
West Virginia University Press and the WVU Department of Creative Writing are pleased to welcome novelist Mo Daviau to the WVU campus for an event Monday, October 13 at 7:30 PM in room 130 Colson Hall on the downtown campus. Daviau will appear with Creative Writing MFA Kanza Javed.
Daviau’s new novel, Epic and Lovely (West Virginia University Press, 2025) is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, causes several physical deformities, and results in death around the age of forty.
Written as a deathbed letter to the UCLA physician who has tracked Nina and the other Good Thumbs throughout their lives, Nina recounts her final days with the group and with Cole, the charismatic, sadistic fellow A12er with whom she has fallen madly in love, who charms and harms her in equal measures. An unlikely alliance with a tech billionaire, the return of her estranged mother, and the birth of the baby she never thought she’d have force Nina to reckon with the triumphs and mistakes of her life and to fight to leave her child in good hands.
Mo Daviau is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Daviau lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a bookseller.
Daviau’s new novel, Epic and Lovely (West Virginia University Press, 2025) is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, causes several physical deformities, and results in death around the age of forty.
Written as a deathbed letter to the UCLA physician who has tracked Nina and the other Good Thumbs throughout their lives, Nina recounts her final days with the group and with Cole, the charismatic, sadistic fellow A12er with whom she has fallen madly in love, who charms and harms her in equal measures. An unlikely alliance with a tech billionaire, the return of her estranged mother, and the birth of the baby she never thought she’d have force Nina to reckon with the triumphs and mistakes of her life and to fight to leave her child in good hands.
Mo Daviau is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Daviau lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a bookseller.