"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." -Muriel Rukeyser

Reading starts at 7:30 pm.
Light refreshments and conversation at 7:00 pm.

Join us for our quarterly reading series, Story is the Thing, where stunning, emerging voices can be heard alongside works from contemporary local established writers.

Reading starts at 7:30 pm. Light refreshments and conversation at 7:00 pm.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Marcelo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. Marcelo's memoir Children of the Land, is forthcoming from Harper Collins in January 2020. He lives in Marysville, California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.

Mag Dimond

Mag is a classical pianist, photographer, gourmet cook, animal rescuer, and philanthropist. Excerpts from her memoir Bowing to Elephants have been honored in American Literary Review, Travelers Tales Solas Awards, the Tulip Tree “Stories that Must be Told” awards, and the 2017 William Faulkner Wisdom awards. Additionally, Dimond has published essays in Elephant Journal, an online magazine with a readership of almost two million. After a career teaching writing to college students in San Francisco and Taos, she often volunteers as a writing tutor at 826 Valencia, an esteemed literacy program launched by David Eggers. You can find her essays on her website: www.magdimond.com.

Shannon Pufahl

Shannon grew up in rural Kansas. She teaches at Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. Her essays, on topics ranging from eighteenth-century America to her childhood, have appeared in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere. Shannon’s debut novel On Swift Horses, was published by Penguin Random House in November 2019. She lives in Monterey, CA, with her wife and their dog.

E.R. Ramzipoor

E.R. Ramzipoor is a writer based in California. She also works as a content marketer, writing about cybercrime and online fraud. She studied political science at UC Berkeley, where she researched underground literature in resistance movements and discovered the forgotten story of Faux Soir. Her writing has been featured in McSweeney’s and The Ventriloquists is her first novel. She lives with her partner and a terrier mix named Lada.

Mathangi Subramanian

Mathangi Subramanian is an award-winning Indian American writer, author, and educator. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Teachers College of Columbia University, and the recipient of a Fulbright as well as other fellowships. Her writing has previously appeared in the Washington Post, Quartz, Al Jazeera America, and elsewhere. A People’s History of Heaven is her first work of literary fiction.

Elizabeth Tallent

Elizabeth Tallent is the author of a novel and four short-story collections, most recently Mendocino Fire. Mendocino Fire was published by Harper in 2015 and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her new book Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism, is forthcoming from Harper Collins in February 2020. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives on the Mendocino Coast with her wife, an antiques dealer.

Tickets are $12