A Special 510 Reading: November 1, 5pm

Put this one on the calendar. It's going to be a great 510 reading: Brian Evenson, A.E. Peterson, Darcelle Bleau. Aaron Cohick of NewLights Press is publishing a handmade book by Brian Evenson, THE DROWNABLE SPECIES. The NewLights Press is an independent publisher of experimental literature and artists books, concentrating primarily on where the two can and do overlap. All NewLights Press books are printed and bound by hand, using techniques ranging from the obsolete (letterpress) to the utilitarian (laser printing). The Press was founded in Baltimore in 2000, and currently resides in San Francisco.

Brian Evenson is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Open Curtain (Coffee House), which was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award and was among Time Out New York's top books of 2006. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection) and The Brotherhood of Mutilation. He has translated work by Chrstian Gailly, Jean FrÈmon and Jacques Jouet. He has received an O. Henry Prize as well as an NEA fellowship. A novel, Last Days, and a new collection of stories, Fugue State, are forthcoming in 2009.

A.E. Peterson lives and writes in Baltimore. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Modern Painters, Poets & Writers, Pierogi Press, Brooklyn Review, Center for Digital Storytelling, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Sacatar Foundation, Fundacion Valparaiso, Ucross Foundation, and Julia and David White Artists Colony. She teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently working on a novel.

Darcelle Bleau graduated from the Johns Hopkins MFA program in 2006. Since then, she has participated in a year-long writing residency at Maryland Art Place and edited the visual literary catalogue, Entangled: Art & Word.

October 18th Reading Highlights

Thanks to everybody who came out Saturday. It was another standing-room only crowd for Charles Rammelkamp, Karen Lillis, and Dan Fesperman. Please remember that we're doubling up in November with readings on November 1st (Brian Evenson, A.E. Peterson, and Darcelle Bleau) and November 15th (Brian Eden, Deborah Radcliffe, and Lia Purpura). Hope to see you then!




Charm City author and poet Charles Rammelkamp, reading from his collection Castleman in the Academy, picks up where last month's Dirty Words reading left off.



Pittsburgh's favorite daughter Karen Lillis joined us to give dynamic, poetic selections from her newest book, The Second Elizabeth.



Baltimore legend Dan Fesperman closes the show with a reading from his novel, The Warlord's Son.

see you in a few weeks!

October 18th Readings: Dan Fesperman, Karen Lillis, and Charles Rammelkamp

Dan Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to more than 30 countries and three war zones. He spent most of that time as a correspondent for The Sun, and it wasn't until a trip to Sarajevo in the winter of '94 that he began writing his first novel, at the age of 39. His fifth novel, The Amateur Spy, published this year by Knopf, chronicles the wanderings of a disgraced American aid worker who has been forcefully recruited to spy on an old Palestinian friend, an assignment that carries him across Greece, Jordan, and the West Bank. Dan's books have won two Dagger awards from Britain's Crime Writer's Association, and a Dashiell Hammett award in the US. He lives in Baltimore.















Karen Lillis is the author of the novels, "The Second Elizabeth" (Six Gallery Press, 2009), and "i, scorpion: foul belly-crawler of the desert"; and the serialized novella, "Magenta's Adventures Underground." She has been involved in the small press for a number of years as editor, publisher, and blogger, among other roles. In 2000, she embarked on a cross-country reading tour via Greyhound. Her poems and prose have appeared in such journals as Avatar Review, anderbo.com, Keyhole Magazine, Long Shot, nthposition.com, and Pulse Berlin; her writing is included in "Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of XXperimental Prose from Contemporary Women Writers" (Spuyten Duyvil, June 2008). She has been a photographer in Virginia, a bookseller in New York City, an art critic in Texas, a writer-in-residence in Paris, and is currently a library science student in Pittsburgh. You can find her on myspace at: http://www.myspace.com/eyescorpion.

Charles Rammelkamp has lived in Baltimore for the past twenty-five years. He's been involved with a variety of publications, including being on the editorial board of THE TEACHER'S VOICE, and he edited a collection of essays entitled FAKE-CITY SYNDROME for Red Hen Press on American cultural issues to be used in college composition and rhetoric classes. He currently edits an online "journal of politics and poetry" called THE POTOMAC. He has published a number of works, including a novel, THE SECRETKEEPERS (Red Hen Press), and a collection of poems, THE BOOK OF LIFE (March Street Press), and several chapbooks, including GO TO HELL, a sequence that deals with a semester in the life of an adjunct English instructor. CASTLEMAN IN THE ACADEMY is a collection of eleven interrelated stories, recently published by March Street Press, about Roger Castleman, a writing teacher at a community college in Baltimore.

BBF Baltimore Festival Readings, Sept 26th

If you missed the titillating Dirty Words reading last Saturday, don't fear; we're double-dipping this month! We'll be at the CityLit tent from 6-8 pm, September 26th at the Baltimore Book Festival! Rafael Alvarez, Maddison Smartt Bell, Michael Kimball, Henry Lewis, Jen Michalski, and Christine Schutt will read. And there's also the matter of free beer, provided by Clipper City Brewery, Aaron Henkin from WYPR's "The Signal," and The CityLit Band!

Rafael Alvarez is a short story writer and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. A former City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Alvarez wrote for the HBO drama "The Wire" in the show's first three seasons and is the author of ORLO AND LEINI, a collection of short fiction and HOMETOWN BOY, an anthology of his journalism. He can be reached at orlo.leini@gmail.com.

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of 12 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. For more details, visit http://faculty.goucher.edu/mbell

Michael Kimball’s 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. His third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, has just been published in the US, UK, and Canada (http://michael-kimball.com/). Time Out New York called the writing “stunning” and the Los Angeles Times said the book was “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” Sam Lipsyte has called Michael Kimball “a hero of contemporary American literature.” He is also responsible for the collaborative art project—Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)--and the documentary film, I Will Smash You (2009).

William Henry Lewis’ first book, IN THE ARMS OF OUR ELDERS, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 1995 and has since seen three printings. His second collection of stories, I GOT SOMEBODY IN STAUNTON, (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2005), has been named by Kirkus Reviews as a Best Book of 2005, and honored as a finalist for the 2006 PEN Faulkner Prize for Fiction. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, College Park. Recently, Lewis has been awarded a 2008 Creative Writing Fellowship in prose fiction by the National Endowment for the Arts. Lewis’s writing has appeared and forthcoming in many literary journals and several anthologies, home and abroad, including Best American Short Stories of 1996.

Jen Michalski's collection of short fiction, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (2007), is available from So New Media. Her fiction has appeared in more than 30 publications, including McSweeney's, Failbetter, storySouth, Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, and others. She is the editor of the literary e-zine jmww and lives in Baltimore. You can visit her at jenmichalski.com

Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections and FLORIDA, a novel and National Book Award finalist. Her second novel, ALL SOULS, was published in April 2008, and has been widely praised as "hauntingly unforgettable" and "one of the best private school novels to appear in recent years." Among other honors, Schutt has twice won the O’Henry Short Story Prize. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, Barnard, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and the University of California-Irvine. In spring she was the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University and this past summer taught at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Schutt is a senior editor of the literary annual NOON. She lives in New York.

Talk Dirty to Me

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September 20th Reading: The Dirty Words Anthology

Join us for a smattering of dirty words as Michael Kimball, Tita Chico, Jessica Anya Blau, Maud Casey, Stacey D'Erasmo, and Merrill Feitell read their entries from Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, a playful encyclopedia (edited by Ellen Sussman) of America's real favorite pastime.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, has just been published in the US, UK, and Canada (http://michael-kimball.com/). 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)—and the documentary film, I Will Smash You.



Tita Chico is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park. She is the author of Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2005) and Editor of the scholarly journal, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.


Jessica Anya Blau is the author of THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES (HarperPerennial 2008). Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and Canada. She is currently teaching at Johns Hopkins University.



MAUD CASEY (maudcasey.com) is the author of the novels The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Genealogy, a New York Times Editor's Pick, and an award-winning story collection, Drastic. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize and international fellowships at the Fundacion Valparaiso and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland and lives in Washington, D.C. [maudcasey.com]

Merrill Feitell's first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. She teaches at the University of Maryland in College Park and lives in Baltimore. She is currently working on a novel.

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and A Seahorse Year, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday, and won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award. Her third novel, The Sky Below, will be published in January, 2009. She is currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

Larry Doyle's 2008 Thurber Prize Nomination

Congrats to recent 510 guest Larry Doyle (August 16th reading)! He is one of three finalists for the esteemed 2008 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Keep your fingers crossed!