MANSFIELD — Author Abbey Mei Otis, who teaches at Oberlin College, will participate in a book talk at Main Street Books, 104 N. Main St., on May 3 at 6 p.m.

Her collection of short stories, Alien Virus Love Disaster, captivated the Main Street Books book club and led to a great discussion last fall. 

“Otis’s short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, putting kids from the moon into a small beach town and then putting the rest of the town under the microscope as they react in ways we hope they would, and then, of course, in ways we’d hope they don’t,” organizers said.

“Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the twelve stories collected in Alien Virus Love Disaster are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future,” they said.

Otis is a writer and teaching artist who teaches at Oberlin College. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.

Her work is forthcoming in Tin House and has been published previously in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Barrelhouse, Gargoyle, and Story Quarterly, among other places.