Readings! Live music! Antics! Beer!
Featuring nationally renowned authors Jose Padua, Monica Prince, Rion Amilcar Scott, Courtney Sexton, and Kate Wagner. Hosted by Amy Freeman, Emily Holland, and Zach Powers, with music by Ralvell Rogers II. Book sales by Loyalty Bookstores.
FREE and open to the public (RSVP below). Open bar for the 21+ crowd. Donations appreciated.
Meet the Readers!
Jose Padua‘s first full length book, A SHORT HISTORY OF MONSTERS, was chosen by former poet laureate Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is now out from the University of Arkansas Press. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as Bomb, Salon.com, Beloit Poetry Journal, Exquisite Corpse, and others. He has written features and reviews for Salon, The Weeklings, NYPress, Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Times, and has read his work at Lollapalooza, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and many other venues. He was a featured reader at the 2012 Split This Rock poetry festival and won the New Guard Review’s 2014 Knightville Poetry Prize. After spending the past ten years with his wife (the poet Heather L. Davis) and children in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he and his family are back in his hometown, Washington DC. Padua also writes the blog Shenandoah Breakdown.
Monica Prince is an assistant professor of activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. Her first collection of poetry, INSTRUCTIONS FOR TEMPORARY SURVIVAL, won the Discovery Award for an outstanding first collection by Red Mountain Press. Her choreopoem, HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN, will be published by [PANK] in spring 2020. She is also the managing editor of the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly and an alumna of the 5th Woman Poetry Collective.
Rion Amilcar Scott’s work has been published in journals such as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, The Rumpus, Fiction International, The Washington City Paper, among others. A story of his earned a place on the Wigleaf Top 50 (very short) Fictions of 2016 and 2013 lists, and one of his essays was listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2015. He was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland and earned an MFA from George Mason University where he won both the Mary Roberts Rinehart award and a Completion Fellowship. He is a Kimbilio fellow. His short story collection, INSURRECTIONS (University Press of Kentucky) was published in August 2016 and won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Fiction and was chosen for The Rumpus’s Book Club. His brand new collection, THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU, is now available from Liveright/Norton. Presently, he teaches English at Bowie State University.
Courtney Sexton is a New Jersey native who grew up between the Delaware River and the sandy Pine Barrens. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, was a 2015 Our City Festival curator and is the co-founder of Washington, DC’s The Inner Loop. She is the recipient of a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship. Water and her dog (or manifestations thereof) are recurrent characters in her writing, and her life, for that matter.
Kate Wagner is an architecture and cultural critic based in Washington, DC. She is the creator of the blog McMansion Hell, which thoroughly examines the phenomenon that is the McMansion, and uses it as a tool for architectural education and humorous cultural remarks. Kate has written about architecture, design, and culture for numerous publications including The Baffler, The Atlantic, CityLab, and The Nation and is an opinions columnist at Curbed.