Lauren Alwan

Chris Drangle

Manjula Martin

Kalpana Mohan

Elizabeth McKenzie

Shanthi Sekaran

Jon Sindell - photo credit: Kenneth Finberg

Join us for the third installment of Story Is the Thing for a lovely evening of storytelling with seven Bay Area authors reading on the theme "To Find a Home." 

There will be wine, cheese and cupcakes at 7:15 -- the program will begin at 7:30.

Readers this time will be Lauren Alwan, Chris Drangle, Manjula Martin, Kalpana Mohan, Elizabeth McKenzie, Shanthi Sekaran and Jon Sindell.

Lauren Alwan's fiction and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, The Bellevue Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Northwest Review of Books, Catapult, The Millions, and elsewhere. In 2016, her story, The Foreign Cinema, received the Bellevue Literary Review's Goldenberg Prize for Fiction selected by Paul Harding. She is a staff contributor at LitStack, a literary news and reviews site, and a prose editor at the museum of americana, an online literary review.

Chris Drangle is a writer from Arkansas. He earned his MFA at Cornell University, where he also served as an assistant editor for Epoch magazine, taught creative writing, and froze often. His fiction has appeared in One Story, the Kenyon Review Online, the Oxford American, and elsewhere, and has been recognized with a Pushcart Prize, the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship at Bread Loaf, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship.

Manjula Martin is the editor of the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Her writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Pacific Standard, SF Weekly, The Billfold, The Toast, and other publications. She is the managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, the fiction and art magazine published by Francis Coppola, and she lives in San Francisco.

Kalpana Mohans publications in India Currents Magazine have won her the New America Media prize and the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club prize. Her first book, Daddykins, a memoir about the last two years with her ailing father will be published this summer by Bloomsbury India. Her book on the evolution of the English language in India will be published by Aleph Book Company in 2018. 

Elizabeth McKenzie's novel The Portable Veblen, set in Palo Alto, California, was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award. It was named a best book of the year by NPR, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, Elle and BookPage. She is also the author of the novel MacGregor Tells The World, a San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune best book of the year, and Stop That Girl, short-listed for The Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and others. She is senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and the managing and fiction editor of Catamaran Literary Reader, based in Santa Cruz. 

Shanthi Sekaran's Lucky Boy (2017), described by Kirkus Reviews as a "superbly crafted and engrossing novel," tells a street-level story of immigration, motherhood and class. Her first novel, The Prayer Room, came out in 2009, and her other writing has appeared in The New York Times, Canteen Magazine, and Huffington Post. She teaches creative writing at California College of the Arts, and is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto.

Jon Sindell writes prose of every length, essays, and humor. His long-story collection, Family Happiness, was published in 2016; his flash-fiction collection, The Roadkill Collection, in 2014. Jon practiced law for twenty-plus years, with an emphasis on civil rights litigation, and is now a full-time personal humanities tutor. He curates the reading series Rolling Writers, and lives in San Francisco with his wife and near his fledglings. Much of his writing appears at jonsindell.com.