Readings! Live music! Antics! Beer!
The Writer’s Center LIVE! is a celebration of literature that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Attendees are treated to 5 exceptional readings, plus a generous serving of tomfoolery. Featuring acclaimed writers Thea Brown, Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, Jamila Minnicks, Bethanne Patrick, and Shannon Sanders. Hosted by Amy Freeman and Emily Holland, with music by Zach Powers. Book sales provided by Loyalty Bookstores.
FREE and open to the public (RSVP below). Open bar for the 21+ crowd. Donations appreciated.
About the Performers
Originally from the Hudson Valley in New York, Thea Brown is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is the author of the chapbook We Are Fantastic (Petri Press 2013) and the full-length collections Think of the Danger (H_NGM_N 2016), Famous Times (Slope Editions 2019), and Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Poems can be found in Oversound, Denver Quarterly, Pinwheel, the Iowa Review, LitHub, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, where she was the 2016–2017 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School, a 2016 Rubys Artist Project Grant awardee, and the recipient of a 2017 UCross Foundation fellowship and the 2020 Art Alliance Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.
Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, the 2022 DC Poet Project winner, is the author of I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd, a memoir-in-poems that fearlessly details the author’s intersecting experiences of repression and self-development. The worlds of hip hop, higher education, and literature combine in this book as an anthem for nerds everywhere.
Jamila Minnicks’ novel Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books, 2023) won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. In 2022, she was awarded a Tennessee Williams scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and she also earned a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her short fiction and essays have been published in CRAFT, Catapult, Blackbird, The Write Launch, and elsewhere. Her piece, Politics of Distraction, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Minnicks is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law, and the Georgetown University Law Center. She lives in Washington, DC.
Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on books and literary ideas to over 200,000 followers. Her work appears frequently in the Los Angeles Times as well as in The Washington Post, NPR Books, and Literary Hub. She sits on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the host of the Missing Pages podcast. Life B is her debut memoir.
Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her debut short story collection, Company, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press on October 3, 2023. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.