Photos from Featherless #14

Ryan Shoemaker reads from "After All the Fun We Had"

Linda Lay reads from "Star Shoes"

Bart Edelman reads from The Geographer's Wife

Thanks for coming.  Our next event is April 13, currently booking.  Stay tuned.

Featherless #14

Ryan Shoemaker, Linda Lay and Bart Edelman will read on March 9th at 8pm at Stories Books & Cafe.  Judging from current conditions there may be a chill and it may be damp, so bring your woolens.

Bios:

Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Ryan Shoemaker is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Santa Monica Review, Grist: A Journal for Writers, Hawai’i Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West.  Ryan lives in Burbank, California with his wife, Jennifer, and two children, Kieran and Haven.  He once shared a plate of bacon with George Saunders in an Athens, Ohio café.

Linda Lay received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and continued her studies at Otis College of Art and Design, where she received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Currently she earns a living as a fashion designer, occasional house sitter and as a teacher of art and writing at an alternative private high school. She’s also a regular contributor to a pop-culture blog called FruitFlyLife.com. Her art and short fiction has been featured in the literary magazines: Sprung Formal, The Black Boot and most recently at SlackLust.com.

Bart Edelman is currently a professor of English at Glendale College, where he edits Eclipse, A Literary Journal. His poetry appears frequently in newspapers and journals, as well as in textbooks and anthologies published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Harcourt Brace, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, and Wadsworth. He teaches poetry workshops across the United States and was poet-in-residence at Monroe College of the State University at New York. Collections of his work include Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press, 1993), Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Press, 1996), The Alphabet of Love (Red Hen Press, 1999), The Gentle Man (Red Hen Press, 2001), and The Last Mojito (Red Hen Press, 2005). He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and currently resides in Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press published his latest collection of poetry, The Geographer’s Wife, in Spring 2012.

Photos from Featherless #13

Edward Gauvin

Kate Durbin

Camille Roy

Thanks to everyone for coming out.  Our next event will be March 9th.

Featherless #13

February's Featherless surprises and delights.  On the lineup: Edward Gauvin, Kate Durbin, and Camille Roy.  On February 10th, 2012, at 8 pm, join us at Stories Books & Cafe for a literary evening. 

Bios to follow:

The winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright Program, the Centre National du Livre, and the American Literary Translators' Association. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010) won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Other translations have appeared in Tin House, Subtropics, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, AGNI Online, and PEN America. The contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, he translates comics for Top Shelf, Archaia, and Lerner.

Writing under the name H.V. Chao, his fiction has previously been published in Epiphany, Nanoism, and Diet Soap. He is a first year fiction PhD student at USC.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist. Her books include The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), E! Entertainment (Insert/Blanc Press Diamond Edition, forthcoming), Gaga Stigmata (Zg Press, forthcoming), The Fashion Issue (Zg Press, forthcoming), and, with Amaranth Borsuk, ABRA (Zg Press, forthcoming).

Camille Roy is a writer and performer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her book, Sherwood Forest came out in 2011 from Futurepoem. She co-edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, a book of essays by writers on their own experimental practices (CoachHouse). Her books include Cheap Speech, a play, from Leroy, and Craquer, a fictional autobiography from 2^nd Story Books , as well as Swarm (two novellas, Black Star Series). Earlier books include The Rosy Medallions (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St Press) and Cold Heaven (plays, from Leslie Scalapino's O Books). She was a founding editor of the online journal Narrativity (http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity). Roy has taught creative writing in multiple genres and forms at several institutions, including San Francisco State University, California State University SummerArts, and Naropa.

Exciting!  Exciting!

Photos from Featherless #12

Ebony Williams

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal

Tim Cummings

Thanks to the writers and audience for a magical night.  Stay tuned for our next event on February 10th.

Featherless #12

It's the first Featherless of 2012, and we have three exciting readers for January.  Ebony Williams, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal and Tim Cummings will present their work at Stories Books & Cafe at 8 pm on Friday, January 13th.

Ebony Williams is a native New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn. Her work usually falls on the side of creative non-fiction and isn’t afraid to straddle the line between poetry and prose. Her work tends to explore the experiences of women in the Diaspora as well as the female body as container for memory, for culture, for an ancestral home often impacted by trauma. Ebony attended Wheaton College in Norton, MA for undergrad majoring in Sociology with a minor in English literature with a focus on creative writing. She spent two-years running the Women and Gender Program at Wheaton College’s Marshall Center for Intercultural Learning after graduating. Currently, Ebony is in her final year of pursuing her Master’s of Fine Arts in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. In addition, Ebony is working on a work of hybrid creative non-fiction, How To Build A Ragdoll, as well as a mixed media visual art instillation and workshop series titled, The Ragdoll Project. Ebony is also on the third book of a Science Fiction trilogy, Grey Society.

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal is a pop culture rubbernecker and NYC traitor to LA. Her writing has been published in The Collagist, PANK, and Work Magazine, presented at the 2011 &Now Festival of Innovative Writing, and is forthcoming in the inaugural Artists Among Artists collection Faggot Dinosaur. She recently received a Lambda Literary Fellowship and is finishing an MFA in Writing at CalArts.

Tim Cummings was born and raised in New York, and holds a degree in theater and writing from New York University.  He is a passionate storyteller who works in a variety of mediums: writing, visuals, theater, film, music, and dance.  His most recent collection of short fiction, ORPHANS, was released this past summer to critical acclaim.  His most recent stage appearances were in The Walworth Farce at Theatre Banshee, and the ten-year anniversary performances of Anne Nelson’s 9/11 play The Guys at The Flea Theater in New York City.  Tim is an octopus and spider enthusiast and is, in general, a lover of all octolegged creatures. 

Delicious snacks and coffee will be available in the bookstore cafe, so stay and mingle. 

Photos from Featherless #11

Kristoffer Huelgas

Angela Peñaredondo

Diana Salier

Many thanks to the poets and participants for a great reading.  Our next event will be January 13, 2012.  Happy winterfest!