Join Why There Are Words – Austin for “Silver Linings” on September 18, 2019, @ 7pm at Malvern Books (613 W. 29th St., Austin) when the following acclaimed artists will share their works on this theme. A $10 donation to WTAW, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit is suggested.
Michael Cross, a talented vocalist, lyricist, composer, and seasoned recording artist, has toured nationally and internationally. Recording projects include TX Blues Voices and his own album Blues Lovin’ Man. His latest collaboration with Joanna Howerton has inspired new material and their duo is steadily building an enthusiastic following.
Joanna Howerton grew up in a musical family in the beautiful hills of Kentucky. In the Blues, she found her true voice and style and honed her vocal skills and played with various R&B and jazz ensembles in New Orleans and Austin. Her partnership and duo with Michael Cross has been transformative, inspiring the creation of a sound that bridges their past and current influences.
Kristen Staby Rembold’s most recent book is Music Lesson, poetry, published in 2019 by Future Cycle Press. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Leaf and Tendril and Coming into This World, and a novel, Felicity, winner of Mid-List First Fiction Series Award. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals including Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Literary Mama, Smartish Pace, and New Ohio Review. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is former co-editor of IRIS: A Journal About Women. She holds degrees from Northwestern University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Kathryn Schwille’s fiction has appeared in New Letters, Memorious, Crazyhorse, West Branch, Sycamore Review and other literary journals. Her stories have twice received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She was an award-winning newspaper reporter before moving to North Carolina to become an editor at the Charlotte Observer. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she lives with her husband in Charlotte, NC and is on the regular faculty at Charlotte Center for Literary Arts.
Mark Solomon was born in NYC in 1941 and has always lived there. He received his BA in English Literature from Columbia College in 1962 and worked toward an MA in 17th Century English Poetry at Columbia Graduate Faculties. His first published poems appeared in Broadway Boogie in 1973. In January 1993 he received an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and since then has published in TriQuarterly, Hanging Loose, BOMB, The Marlboro Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Poetry Review,and other periodicals and anthologies. His chapbook Her Whom I Summoned, published in 2015. My True Body is his first full-length collection.
Marian Szczepanski is the author of the historical novel Playing St. Barbara (High Hill Press, 2013), which Huffington Post called “a stunning debut novel that shimmers with unforgettable characters while casting necessary light on a dark chapter in American history.” She has won awards for short fiction and magazine writing and holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a faculty member at Houston’s Writespace creative writing center and has also taught for the Texas Writers League (Austin), Gemini Ink (San Antonio), Village Writing School (Eureka Springs and Rogers, AR) University of Pittsburgh’s Writers Café and St. Francis University (Loretto, PA). She divides her time between Houston and Hood River, Oregon.
Why There Are Words – Austin is a quarterly series that is part of a national neighborhood of reading series where writers share their work live with an audience. The Austin chapter, hosted by Alison Moore, features writers and performers of prose, poetry, and song. The series is a program of WTAW Press, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit independent publisher of exceptional literary books.
