Join us December 9 at 7:00 PM for the last Why There Are Words reading event of the year. It’s been a wonderful year that we’ll end in style with work from emerging and widely-published fiction writers, some prose poetry, and an excerpt and discussion of a graphic novel. Wild Card — Anything Goes is the theme. Don’t miss it.
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of four works of fiction, most recently The Story of a Marriage. He’s the recipient of the PEN/O’Henry Prize for Short Fiction, the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library.
Daphne Kalotay is the author of the newly published novel Russian Winter (HarperCollins 2010), which was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Her fiction collection Calamity and Other Stories (KnopfDoubleday 2005) was a Poets & Writers “Notable Book” and short-listed for the 2005 Story Prize.
A recipient of fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Caitlin Myer‘s short stories have been published in charming, short-lived literary magazines, online journals and the occasional anthology. Her one-woman play about Simone de Beauvoir attracted sold-out crowds in Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Provo, Utah. Yes, she was raised Mormon. No, she doesn’t practice. If you buy her a drink, she’ll be happy to tell you all about it. Her first novel, Hoodoo, flirts with publishers, but fears commitment. She is the Founder of Portuguese Artists Colony, a collection of disreputable characters who write and stage monthly readings at Fivepoints Arthouse in San Francisco. She is not Portuguese.
Erich Origen is an artist living in San Francisco, and the author of The
Adventures of Unemployed Man. His previous book, Goodnight Bush, was a New York Times bestseller and has sold more than 120,000 copies. He and co-author Gan Golan have appeared on CNN, Time, Huffington Post and others to discuss the book.
Peter Orner is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, finalist for the Los Angles Times Book Prize, and Esther Stories, Winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Best American Stories, and twice received the Pushcart Prize. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Orner is also the editor of the oral history, Underground America, and co-editor (with Annie Holmes) of Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives just out from McSweeney’s. A new novel, Love and Shame and Love, will be published by Little Brown in fall, 2011. He teaches at San Francisco State.
Robert Thomas’ first book, Door to Door, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and published by Fordham University Press in 2002, and his second book, Dragging the Lake, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2006. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Oakland, California.
