“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Be a part of the fourth installment of Story Is the Thing: a lovely evening of storytelling with seven Bay Area authors reading on the theme "Forbidden Places."
There will be wine, cheese, and cupcakes at 7:15 pm -- the program will begin at 7:30 pm.
Readers this time will be Joan Frank, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Ethel Rohan, Elaine Ray, Fyza Parviz, Ron Chapman, and Nicola Maye Goldberg.
Joan Frank is the author of six books of fiction and a book of collected essays. All the News I Need, her fourth novel, won the 2016 Juniper Prize for Fiction. Joan's last story collection, In Envy Country, won the Richard Sullivan Prize and the Gold ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award. Her book of essays, Because You Have To: A Writing Life, won the Silver ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and recipient of many grants and honors, Joan also frequently reviews literary fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the North Bay with her husband, playwright Bob Duxbury.
Lucy Jane Bledsoes new novel, A Thin Bright Line, which the New York Times says triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances, was published in October. She's the author of five other novels, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and a collection of short stories. Her fiction has won a Yaddo Fellowship, the 2013 Saturday Evening Post Fiction Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart nomination, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Chinese. Her next novel, The Evolution of Love, will be published in 2018.
Ethel Rohan's debut novel is The Weight of Him (St. Martin's Press, February 2017). She is also the author of two story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone, the former longlisted for The Edge Hill Prize and the latter longlisted for The Story Prize. An award-winning short story writer and 1 of 14 recently longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Award, the world's richest prize for a single short story, her work has appeared in The New York Times, World Literature Today, The Washington Post, Tin House Online, GUERNICA Magazine, and many more. Raised in Ireland, she lives in San Francisco.
Elaine Ray is a writer based in Stanford, California. Her story Pidgin is the winner of the Gival Press 2016 Short Story Award. In 2015, Elaine completed the Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing offered by Stanford Continuing Studies. She is currently working on the final draft of a novel titled WANTED. Elaine has spent most of her career as a journalist, working for many years as an editorial writer for the Boston Globe and as an editor and writer for Essence magazine. She is currently a communications director at Stanford University. Her blog, My Father's Posts, is a collection of her own commentary and the writings of her father, who was a journalist in Harlem in the 20s, 30s and 40s.
Fyza Parviz originally hails from Peshawar Pakistan and has been living in the Bay Area for 14 years. She is a Software & Electrical Engineer by profession and loves to read, write, attend events, and create literary experiences. She is also on the Leadership Team for the Annual Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley and is pursuing her Masters in Liberal Arts from Stanford. She is currently developing an engaging Online Social Platform for writers and readers. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have been published in PaperCuts Magazine and LitSeen.
Ron Chapman is a comedian, improviser, and actor who loves reading aloud.
Nicola Maye Goldberg is the author of Other Women (Sad Spell Press, 2016). She is a graduate of Bard College, where she received the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her work has appeared in the Winter Tangerine Review, the Quietus, Queen Mob's Tea House, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University.
Tickets: $10.00 per person