Season 4, Episode 7: October 15th

October 15th, 5pm, Minas -- Mark Cugini, Jackie Wang, John Rowell, Laura Ellen Scott -- you will be able to say you were there when it happened.

Mark Cugini's got slugs for snitches. The managing editor of Big Lucks, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in NOÖ, Everyday Genius, Stymie, Petrichor Machine and others. He curates the Three Tent Reading Series in Washington, DC and is the recent recipient of a Scholarship Grant to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst.



Jackie Wang is a Baltimore-based writer and performer. Her hybrid writings on literature, art, film, music, theory, politics, and culture can be read on HTMLGIANT, BOMBlog and her personal blog. She has recently published an essay in the anthology Other Tongues (Inanna Publications) about hybrid identities and writing temporalities. She is currently working on a book of poetry and a novel about mother-ghosts, adolescent queer desire, kidney stones, and parthenogenetic birth stories.

John Rowell is the author of the short story collection The Music of Your Life (Simon and Schuster), which was named a Dazzling Debut/Breakout Book of Spring, 2003 at Amazon.com, and was also a finalist for the 2004 Ferro-Grumley Prize for Best Fiction Book of the Year. John served for two years as the Reginald S. Tickner Fellow/Writer-In-Residence at The Gilman School of Baltimore, Maryland, where he is now a member of the permanent Upper School faculty, teaching English and Creative Writing and directing in the theater program. John’s fiction, essays and reviews have been featured in such publications as Tin House, Bloom and Show Business Weekly, among others, and he was recently represented with a story in Long Story Short: Flash Fiction From Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers, published by UNC Press. Currently, he is at work on a novel entitled Overachievers: A Love Story, and last year completed a stage adaptation of several of the stories in The Music of Your Life, which received its World Premiere at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London’s West End in November, 2010.

Laura Ellen Scott's debut novel is Death Wishing, a comic fantasy set in New Orleans. She teaches fiction writing at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia and has published traditional short stories in Ploughshares, Hayden's Ferry Review, Barrlehouse, and the Paycock Press anthology Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women. However, she also writes experimental, magic realist fiction, most of which is very short for online journals such as Wigleaf, Storyglossia, and elimae. Her collection of very short fiction, Curio, was published by Uncanny Valley Press earlier this year.

June 19th Readings: Laura Ellen Scott, Timothy Gager, Bill Black, and Curtis Smith

Laura Ellen Scott teaches fiction writing to undergraduates at George Mason University, and in 2009-2010 published 19 short stories in print and online, including work selected for The Wigleaf Top Fifty and Barrelhouse magazine's Futures issue. Her work was nominated for Dzanc's Best of the Web 2010 anthology twice, and she is currently Fiction editor of Prick of the Spindle.

Timothy Gager is the author of eight books of short fiction and poetry. His latest, Treating a Sick Animal: Flash and Micro Fictions (Cervena Barva Press), features over 40 stories, many previously published in various literary magazines. He hosts the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every month and is the co-founder of Somerville News Writers Festival. He has had over 200 works of fiction and poetry published since 2007, of which eight have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Timothy is the current Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review, and has edited the book OUT OF THE BLUE WRITERS UNITE: A BOOK OF POETRY AND PROSE FROM THE OUT OF THE BLUE ART GALLERY.

Bill Black's work has appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, The Black Warrior Review, Short FICTION, and elsewhere. He has taught literature and creative writing at Western Washington University, Ohio University, and The Johns Hopkins University, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania. He a founding Co-Director of the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, Pennsylvania.


Curtis Smith's stories and essays have appeared in over 60 literary journals and have been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best American Spiritual Writing. Press 53 has released his last two story collections (THE SPECIES CROWN and BAD MONKEY); Casperian Books has published his last two novels (SOUND AND NOISE and TRUTH OR SOMETHING LIKE IT). This fall, Sunnyoutside will publish his essay collection, THE AGNOSTIC'S PRAYER.