Join us on Thursday, June 21st for our quarterly reading series - Story is the Thing - that highlights established authors and stars on the rise. This evening, we'll showcase a dynamic and diverse group of seven writers reading on the theme "Kindness": Dinika Amaral, Idris Anderson, Tristen Chang, Betsy Franco, Carrie La Seur, Elaine Castillo, and Peg Alford Pursell.
“We are real only in moments of kindness" -cited by Meave Brennan in her author's note from "The Long-Winded Lady."
Reading starts at 7:30 pm. Light refreshments and conversation at 7:00 pm.
Dinika Amaral was born and raised in Bombay, India. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Times of India, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, Denver Quarterly, the Massachusetts Review, and in the Iowa Review (winner of the Tim McGinnis award). Presently, a Steinbeck Fellow, she is working on an unlinked story collection and a novel.
Idris Anderson’s second collection of poems Doubtful Soundwas selected by Sherod Santos for the Hollis Summers Prize of Ohio UP, and was just published in March 2018. Her first collection of poems Mrs. Ramsay's Knee was selected by Harold Bloom for the May Swenson Poetry Award. She has won a Pushcart Prize (2010) and the New York Yeats Society Poetry Prize. She has published poems in AGNI Crab Orchard Review, The Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, Plume, Southern Review, and other journals.
Tristen Chang grew up in Woodland, California, and received her MA in English from UC Davis. Her work has appeared in various journals and she was twice a finalist for Glimmer Train's short story award. Recently, she won first place in Six Fold's fiction contest and was awarded the Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction. She now lives in San Francisco and teaches creative writing.
Betsy Franco is an award winning author of over eighty books, including her novel Naked, her YA, Metamorphosis Junior Year, and her picture books and poetry collections. She wrote the screenplay for Naked, which has been optioned for a film, and she was screenwriting mentor for Metamorphosis, featured at the Mill Valley Film Festival and the basis of a sold-out play. She loves working with teens and is inspired by her creative sons, James, Tom, and Dave.
Carrie La Seur practices energy and environmental law on behalf of farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans, and is a seventh generation Montanan. In 2016 she helped found The House of Books, a co-op bookstore in downtown Billings, MT. In 2006, Carrie founded the legal nonprofit Plains Justice, which provides public interest energy and environmental legal services in the northern plains states and played a key role in halting several new coal plants, enacting clean energy reforms, and launching the Keystone XL pipeline campaign. Her writing has appeared in Grist, the Guardian, Harvard Law and Policy Review, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Rumpus and Salon.
Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and received her MA in creative and life writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in Milpitas, California. America is Not the Heart is her first novel.
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, a collection of fiction and hybrid prose with praise from Peter Orner, Joan Silber, Antonya Nelson, and others, and featured by Poets & Writers magazine’s second annual 5 over 50, December 2017. Her second book, A Girl Goes into the Forest, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in 2019. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Joyland Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and of WTAW Press.