November reading photos

In case you missed our fabulous double feature in November:



Well, it looks like not many of you did. From the November 14th reading.



Kathy Flann reads from a novel in progress.



Glenn Moomau reads from a novel just completed.



Robin Hemley reads from his latest book, Do Over!



Madison Smartt Bell reads from the newly released Devil's Dream.



Another fine turnout for the November 21st reading.


Josh Weil reads from The New Valley



Laura van den Berg reads from What the World Will Look Like When the Water Leaves Us



Geoffrey Becker reads from his 2009 Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection, Black Elvis

November 21st Reading, Which Will Be Great: Josh Weil, Laura van den Berg, Geoffrey Becker

Josh Weil is the author of the novella collection The New Valley (Grove, 2009), a New York Times Editors Choice selection for which he was honored with a “5 Under 35” National Book Award. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and Glimmer Train, among other journals; he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Granta Online, and Poets & Writers. Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright grant, a Writer’s Center Emerging Writer Fellowship, the Dana Award in Portfolio, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. As the 2009 Tickner Fellow, he is the writer-in-residence at Gilman School in Baltimore, where he is at work on a novel.

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, American Short Fiction, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among others. Laura’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, October 2009), is the winner of the Dzanc Prize and was recently selected by Barnes & Noble for their "Discover Great New Writers" Program. To learn more about Laura, please visit www.lauravandenberg.com.

Geoffrey Becker’s new book of stories, Black Elvis (University of Georgia Press, October, 2009), won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. His novel, Hot Springs, is forthcoming from Tin House books. He is the author of two previous books, Dangerous Men, a collection that won the Drue Heinz Prize, and Bluestown, a novel. His other awards and honors include an NEA fellowship, selection for the Best American Short Stories anthology, the Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune, and the Parthenon Prize. He teaches writing at Towson University in Maryland, where he also directs the graduate program in Professional Writing.

Special November 14th Reading: Kathy Flann, Glenn Moomau, Robin Hemley, and Madison Smartt Bell

We have a special, extra reading in November on the 14th, and you'd be crazy to miss it: Kathy Flann, Glenn Moomau, Robin Hemley, and Madison Smartt Bell. Same time (5 pm), same place (Minas Gallery), same lovely hosts (Michael, Jen, Peggy, and Minas), and same well-cultured and discerning attendees (you). See you then!



Kathy Flann's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, The Barcelona Review, The Adirondack Review, Quarterly West, Blackbird, The Del Sol Review, Yemassee, Southern Humanities Review, The Texas Review, The O. Henry Festival Stories, and New Stories from the South. A novella won the AE Coppard Prize for Long Fiction and was published by White Eagle Coffee Store Press in 2008. A short story collection entitled Smoky Ordinary won the 2008 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award and was published by Snake Nation Press. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Goucher College in Baltimore.



Glenn Moomau teaches at American University and is the author of Ted Nugent Condominium, From Boston to Austin with the Glenmont Popes, a book that novelist Howard Norman called a “searing anti-memoir.” His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Link, Bomb, The Westminster Review, Gargoyle, and The Washington Post, among other publications. He is also a musician whose work has appeared on numerous recordings. Most recently, his life as a teacher, writer, and musician was profiled on NPR radio show, The Signal, and he was a featured performer in the award-winning documentary, Euphoria.


Robin Hemley is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on DO-OVER!. He has published seven books, and his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies. Robin received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop; he currently directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City, IA.


Madison Smartt Bell is the author of 13 novels, including SOLDIER's JOY, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short stories: ZERO DB (1987) and BARKING MAN (1990). In 2002, the novel DOCTOR SLEEP was adapted as a film, Close Your Eyes, starring Goran Visnjic, Paddy Considine, and Shirley Henderson. Bell's eighth novel, ALL SOUL'S RISING, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. All Souls Rising, along with the second and third novels of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That The Builder Refused, is available in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, appeared from Pantheon in 2007. Born and raised in Tennessee, he has lived in New York and in London and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland, along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires, and daughter. He is currently Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College, and has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 2003. DEVIL'S DREAM, a novel based on the career of Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, will be published by Pantheon in November 2009.

October 17th Reading

It was rainy Saturday, but we were packed and dry at Minas Gallery to hear Dylan Landis, Sherrie Flick, and Elise Levine!



This is not a staged photo—people are always this happy at the 510.



Dylan Landis recounts the exploits of Angelina and Leah in her collection of short stories NORMAL PEOPLE DON'T LIVE LIKE THIS.



Sherrie Flick discusses the things couples can do in laundromats in her novel RECONSIDERING HAPPINESS.



Baltimore favorite Elise Levine delights with an excerpt from her new novel in progress.

See you on November 14th for a special evening with Robin Hemley, Glenn Moomau, Kathy Flann, and Maddison Smartt Bell!

510 Reading: October 17th

Dylan Landis is the author of Normal People Don't Live Like This (Persea), a debut novel-in-stories that has won praise from Vanity Fair, More, and Booklist. Her fiction has appeared in Bomb, Tin House and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she has won the Poets & Writers California Exchange Award and an NEA-funded Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Normal People was a finalist for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.

Sherrie Flick’s debut novel Reconsidering Happiness is just out with University of Nebraska Press. I Call This Flirting, her awarding-winning chapbook of flash fiction, was published in 2004 (Flume Press). Her work appears in the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward (Norton) and New Sudden Fiction (Norton) as well as You Have Time For This (Ooligan Press). A recipient of a PA Council on the Arts grant, she lives in Pittsburgh where she works as a freelance writer and directs the Gist Street Reading Series. www.sherrieflick.com

Originally from Toronto, Elise Levine was named by Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s most important emerging women writers. Reviewers have called Levine “a cutting-edge literary sensation” and “one of Canada’s finest fiction writers … a sensitive, cagey dominatrix of literary form and human psychology.” She is the author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications. Her poems, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous periodicals including Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Prairie Schooner, Best Canadian Stories, the Journey Prize Anthology, and Canada’s The National Post. She is the recipient of a Canadian National Magazine Award for Fiction, and many awards including ones from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, as well as residency fellowships from, among others, the McDowell Colony and Yaddo, where she was an Eli Cantor Fellow. She currently resides in Baltimore, where she teaches creative writing at Towson University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

510 Readings at the Baltimore Book Festival!

We've hosting our second 510 reading this September at the Baltimore Book Festival, and here's what you need to know:

When? Saturday 26th, 5 pm
Where? Baltimore Book Festival, CityLit Tent (near east side of the monument)
Who? Terese Svoboda, Shanthi Sekaran, John Dermot Woods, Dan Fesperman, Justin Sirois, Savannah Schroll Guz, Michael Kimball, and Jen Michalski
Why? Because we are the only dedicated fiction reading series in Baltimore

AUTHOR BIOS:


Terese Svoboda is the author of eleven books of prose and poetry, most recently Weapons Grade, her fifth book of poetry, and a reissue of Trailer Girl and Other Stories, her third book of fiction forthcoming this fall. “Astounding!” wrote the NY Post about her 2008 memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent that won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her writing has been featured in the TLS, New Yorker, New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Bomb, Columbia, Yale Review, and the Paris Review. Her honors include an O. Henry Prize for the short story, a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a translation NEH grant, three New York Foundation for the Arts grants in poetry and fiction, a New York State Council for the Arts and a Jerome Foundation grant in video, the John Golden Award in playwriting, a Bellagio residency, the Bobst Prize in fiction and the Iowa Prize in poetry.


Shanthi Sekaran was born and raised in Northern California. After graduating from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, she moved to Germany, then England, and now lives between London and Berkeley. Her short story, Stalin, was included in Best New American Voices 2004 (Harcourt). Her debut novel, The Prayer Room, was released in 2009 from MacAdam/Cage.


John Dermot Woods draws comics and writes stories in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the novel The Complete Collection of people, places & things (BlazeVOX Books) and the comic chapbook The Remains (Doublecross Press). He edits the arts quarterly Action,Yes and organizes the online reading series Apostrophe Cast. He is a professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY.


Dan Fesperman's six novels of international intrigue have captured acclaim in eleven different languages while winning a Dashiell Hammett Award in the United States and two Dagger awards in the United Kingdom. Dan's newest novel, The Arms Maker of Berlin, is now available in the both the US and UK.


Justin Sirois is founder and codirector of Narrow House, an experimental writing publishing collective. He received Maryland State Art Council grants for poetry in 2003 and 2007. His books include Secondary Sound (BlazeVOX Books) and MLKNG SCKLS (Publishing Genius). Currently, Justin is trying to find a publisher for his latest novel written in collaboration with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy about displaced Iraqis living in Fallujah in April of '04. He also is a designer for Edge Books.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, was recently published in the US, UK, and Canada (http://michael-kimball.com/). The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. He is also responsible for the collaborative art project--Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard).


Jen Michalski is the author of the short story collection CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (So New Media). Her work has appeared in more than 50 publications, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, failbetter, storySouth, Gargoyle, Hobart, The Potomac Review, 42opus, and others. She is the editor of the online lit zine jmww.

Savannah Schroll Guz is author of the short story collections, The Famous & The Anonymous (2004) and American Soma (2009). She is also editor of the theme-based fiction anthology, Consumed: Women on Excess (2005). Previously, her reviews and cultural criticism have appeared in Sculpture, ZMag, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Bitch Magazine, Popmatters, Pittsburgh City Paper, and Library Journal, where she has a monthly column. She teaches at West Virginia Northern Community College and is The New Yinzer's fiction editor. Savannah and husband Michael live in West Virginia.

September 18th Reading

Thanks to everyone who came out for Sam Lignon, Robert Lopez, Blake Butler, Johannah Rodgers, and Donald Breckenridge. It was an amazing, strange, fabulous display of voices, a big, big love.

Sam Lignon pondered whether the Pixies sing "bone mashing" instead of "bone machine" in his blunt, powerful piece from DRIFT AND SWERVE:



Johannah Rodgers mused about code partners and identity theft in her novel-in-progress:



Robert Lopez drew us an stick-figure air conditioner, among other things, in his latest book, KAMBY BOLOGNO MEAN RIVER:



Donald Breckenridge wonders what we talk about when we talk about love in New York City in his latest novel, YOU ARE HERE:



Blake Butler assaults us with apocalyptic visions and bloody babies from his new collection, SCORCH ATLAS. And then we were off to dinner:

September 19th Readings: Blake Butler, Robert Lopez, Johanna Rodgers, Sam Ligon, Donald Breckenridge

Blake Butler is the author of EVER (Calamari Press) and Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books). He edits HTML Giant and blogs here.






Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Kamby Bolongo Mean River and Part of the World. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University.





Johannah Rodgers has been living and writing in Brooklyn for the last fifteen years. Her book, sentences, a collection of short stories, essays, and drawings, was published by Red Dust in 2007, and her chapbook, “necessary fictions,” was published by Sona Books in 2003. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Fence, Bookforum, Fiction, CHAIN Arts , Pierogi Press, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she is a contributing editor. She teaches writing and literature courses at The City University of New York, where she is an assistant professor in English and is working on a project that investigates experimental approaches to storytelling and narrative through the use of "generated" and found language.


Samuel Ligon is the author of a collection of stories, Drift and Swerve (Autumn House 2009), and a novel, Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins 2003). His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers, in Spokane, Washington, and is the editor of Willow Springs.



Donald Breckenridge is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail, editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and co-editor of the InTranslation website. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust, 1998), and the novel 6/2/95 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002). His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming from Autonomedia and his novel YOU ARE HERE is out now on Starcherone Books.

August 15th Reading

Hi, everybody,

Thanks so much for coming out Saturday. Even though Tania James was unable to make it, it was all good: she was detained in DC, receiving an award from the Kerala Tristate Association for Atltas of Unknowns. We promise we'll have her back in early 2010, and you can see what all the excitement is about her debut novel yourself.

Jason Tinney, Michael Pollock, and Paula Bomer were there, though, and they were awesome!

Jason Tinney entertained us with tales of lawn movers and yellowjackets, washing machines and drying machines, and the do's and dont's of microwaving underwear.




Michael Pollock, editor of First City Review and native of Philadelphia, was up next. We were treated to many things that we shouldn't try at home, such as driving in the dark with the headlights off.



Paula Bomer, who came down from New York to read, wrapped up the show, continuing on the theme of "do as I say, not as I do." In fact, I cannot repeat here almost any of the words she spoke. If you want to read it yourself, look up the last issue of New York Tyrant.



Hope you can join us next month! We have FOURTEEN (yes, FOURTEEN) authors lined up, at our regular reading on September 19th (Sam Ligon, Robert Lopez, Blake Butler, Johannah Rodgers, and Donald Breckenridge) at Minas and the Baltimore Book Festival on September 26th (Savannah Schroll Guz, Dan Fesperman, Terese Svoboda, Shanthi Sekaran, John Woods, Justin Sirois, Michael Kimball, and Jen Michalski) in Mount Vernon.

August 15th Readings: Tania James, Paula Bomer, Michael Pollock, and Jason Tinney

Tania James is the author of a debut novel Atlas of Unknowns (Knopf). Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, she splits her time between New York City and Washington, DC, and has much love for the Bolt Bus that ferries her back and forth. She has been published in One Story magazine and The New York Times. Visit her at www.taniajames.com.



Paula Bomer's fiction has appeared in Open City, Fiction, Nerve, The Mississippi Review, The New York Tyrant, First City Review, Storyglossia, juked, Best American Erotica 2002, 2003(S&S), Word Riot, Sub-Lit, and elsewhere. You can find out more about her or reach her by commenting on her blog at:
http://www.paulabomer.com


Michael Pollock is the editor of First City Review, a literary magazine out of Philadelphia. His work has appeared in Inside Magazine.


Writer/Performer Jason Tinney was born in Frederick, MD. His first book LOUISE PARIS AND OTHER WALTZES (poetry/prose) was published in 2002. BLUEBIRD (short stories and poems) was published in 2003. Three of his short stories were published in the anthology, OUT OF TUNE in 2007. He performs with two Baltimore-based bands, The Donegal X-Press and The Wayfarers. Tinney and artist Brian Slagle have collaborated on The Swinging Bridge, a traveling literary and visual arts show, since 2003. Tinney’s writing has appeared in magazines such as Maryland Life, Style, Chesapeake Life, Urbanite, and Baltimore Magazine. For more information about books by Tinney, visit Hilliard and Harris Publishing at www.hilliardandharris.com.

July 18th Readings: John Barry, Scott Price, Ivy Goodman, Jamie Gaughran-Perez

Although Artscape held Baltimore in its intoxicating grip this past weekend, some of us were not deterred from July 18th's 510 reaing. They were not disappointed.



John Barry began the evening reading a new piece about life, love, and death at the National Arboretum.



Next, Scott Price followed, dissecting the life (and death) of minor-league baseball players. Here, he reads from his latest book, The Heart of the Game.



After the break, Ivy Goodman read from a work in progress about property lines, bad neighbors, bratty children, and whistling teeth.



Finally, Jamie Gaugran-Perez closed the night with excerpts from his novel in progress, a pastiche of events that circle and ultimately connect to each other.

Thanks for another great reading. See you next month for Tania James, Paula Bomer, Michael Pollock of First City Review, and Jason Tinney.