The Washington Writers’ Publishing House celebrates the 2024 winners of its annual fiction, poetry, and nonfiction contests! Varun Gauri will read from the Carol Trawick 50th Anniversary Fiction award-winning novel For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus. Chanlee Luu will read from the Jean Feldman Poetry award-winning The Machine Autocorrects Code to I. Megan Doney will read from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Nonfiction award-winning UNARMED: An American Educator’s Memoir. Reception to follow.
FREE and open to the public. RSVP required below.
Varun Gauri’s short fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. His novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, is a love story and comedy of manners about a young couple who, despite having dated, choose arranged marriage. He teaches courses on behavioral economics and global poverty at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.
Chanlee Luu is a Vietnamese-Chinese American writer from Virginia. She received her MFA in creative writing from Hollins University, and BS in chemical engineering from UVA, where she competed in poetry slams. She writes about identity, pop culture, science, politics, and everything else. She can be found on Twitter @ChanleeLuu, and her work in Snowflake Magazine, the gamut mag, Cutbow Quarterly, Tint Journal, Honey Lit, The Offing, and diaCRITICS, among others, all at chanleeluu.weebly.com.
Megan Doney is a writer and English professor in Virginia. Her work has been published in Ilanot Review, New Limestone Review, Rappahannock Review, Creative Nonfiction, Earth &; Altar, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as in the anthologies Allegheny and If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. Her essay “The Wolf and the Dog” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a Fulbright scholar in South Africa in 2007, and returned there in 2015 to study reconciliation and violence. Doney earned an MFA from Lesley University.
Washington Writers’ Publishing House is a non-profit, cooperative literary organization that has published over 100 volumes of poetry since 1975 as well as fiction and nonfiction. The press sponsors three annual competitions for writers living in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and the winners of each category (one each in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction) comprise our annual slate. In 2021, WWPH launched an online literary journal, WWPH WRITES, to expand our mission to further the creative work of writers in our region. In 2024, WWPH launched our biennial works in translation series. More about our literary cooperative nonprofit press, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary at washingtonwriters.org.
If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.