Join Why There Are Words on July 12, 2018, at Studio 333 in Sausalito when seven acclaimed authors take the stage to present their works. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10 entry fee at the door (cash or check made payable to Studio 333). Cash bar. Studio 333 is located at 333 Caledonia Street.
Mari Coates holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and has published her stories in small literary journals. She is grateful for residencies at I-Park, Ragdale, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods, where she developed and completed her first novel, now titled The Pelton Papers. She very much loved being part of the inaugural Why There Are Words and is happy to be back. She lives in San Francisco, where, before embarking on fiction writing, she was an arts writer and theater critic.
Helen Fremont’s memoir After Long Silence (Delta, 2000) was a national bestseller, and a Featured Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Her works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The O. Henry Awards, Ploughshares, and The Harvard Review. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she was a teaching Fellow at Bread Loaf in 1999, and a teaching Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute in 2001. From 1999 to 2008 she was a Scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center Scholars Program at Brandeis University. She lives in Boston with her wife and works as a public defender.
Marjorie Hudson is the author of Accidental Birds of the Carolinas (Press 53, 2011), a short story collection that received a PEN/Hemingway Honorable Mention for Distinguished First Fiction. She is also author of Searching for Virginia Dare (Press 53, 2007), a Blue Highways exploration of the fate of the first English child born in America. Her essay “Dear Joni” will be published in June 2018 in the anthology Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations That Changed Their Lives, from McFarland & Co. She has received fellowships from the Hemingway Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers. She teaches creative writing through her own Kitchen Table Workshops, and she has just completed an epic novel about a mythical field in the rural South.
Nancy Koerbel’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Redactions, One, and The Pittsburgh Poetry Review. A former recipient of a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, she lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she teaches legal and business writing, works as a copyeditor for a large tech company, and coordinates the Pittsburgh branch of Why There are Words.
Karen Llagas’s first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010. A recipient of a Hedgebrook Residency and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, she lives in San Francisco and works as a freelance translator & lecturer at UC Berkeley.
Alison Moore is the author of four books, Riders on the Orphan Train (Roadworthy Press, 2012) completed through a fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts, a collection of short stories entitled The Middle of Elsewhere (University of Arkansas Press, 2006), a novel, Synonym for Love (Penguin/Plume, 1996), and a collection of short stories, Small Spaces between Emergencies (Mercury House, 1993), one of the Notable Books of 1993 chosen by The American Library Association. She is the Coordinator for Why There Are Words-Austin, and lives in Austin, Texas, when she’s not on the road. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and a former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona, she has developed educational outreach programs for the National Orphan Train Museum, and for ArtsReach, a Native American literacy project in Southern Arizona. Since 1999, after leaving a tenure-track job, she has been an itinerant performer with singer/songwriter Phil Lancaster. Together, they perform a multi-media program called Riders on the Orphan Train in museums and libraries in the West.
Amelie Prusik is the author of the novel Light Sister, Dark Sister (Random House, 1994) and has published short fiction in The North American Review, America West, Bosque, Lantern Journal, and The Copenhagen Review. Her chapbook, Octavia Street was published in 2017 by WTAW Press. Her poetry has appeared in Antaeus and Intro 8. A graduate of the Warren Wilson Program For Writers, she and teaches at DePaul University in Chicago.
Why There Are Words (WTAW) is an award-winning national reading series founded in Sausalito in 2010 by Peg Alford Pursell, now expanded to six additional major cities in the U.S., with more planned in the future. The series draws a full house of Bay Area residents every second Thursday to Studio 333, located at 333 Caledonia Street, Sausalito, CA 94965. The series is a program of the 501(c)3 non-profit WTAW Press, publisher of award-winning exceptional literary books.
