Join us for the first quarterly reading of the year of the Why There Are Words – New Orleans branch on Wednesday, March 13 at 6 PM – 8 PM! Hear from the following featured local writers reading on the theme of “Transformation” in one of New Orleans’s most beloved independent bookstores, Octavia Books. Books will be on sale and authors will be signing. $10 suggested donation at the door. Curated and emceed by Liz Green.
New Orleans Writers Workshop co-founder Allison Alsup teaches and coaches fiction writers of all levels. Her short stories have won multiple awards, including those from A Room of Her Own Foundation, New Millennium Writings, Philadelphia Stories, and the Dana Awards; she is currently shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize, England’s largest short story competition. Her story, “Old Houses” was selected for the 2014 O’ Henry Prize Stories. Her New Orleans food and cocktail writing includes The French Quarter Drinking Companion: A Guide to Bars in America’s Most Eclectic Neighborhood.
Randy Bates’s credits include RINGS: On the Life and Family of a Southern Fighter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Dolphin Island (Finishing Line Press), an NEA grant, and work in the Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and others. He is a long-time resident of New Orleans and teaches nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans.
Julia Carey is a recovered restaurateur from New Orleans who writes fiction and poetry. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and can be found in the journals Psychopomp Magazine, VIDA, the Dudley Review, and Mason’s Road among others, as well as the anthologies New Orleans: What Can’t Be Lost and Louisiana in Words. She is a winner of the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Speitz Prize in Poetry. Currently, she is a professor of English Literature with Bard Early College in New Orleans, where she directs the Writing Studio and teaches creative writing.
Vincent Cellucci wrote An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011) and edited Fuck Poems: An Exceptional Anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). He also has two collaborative titles: come back river (Finishing Line Press) and _A Ship on the Line (Unlikely Books), which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. His latest is the just-released book of poetry, Absence Like Sun (Lavender Ink, February 2019). He teaches communication and digital media for the College of Art & Design at Louisiana State University.
Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novel The Talented Ribkins, which received the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Guernica, and Copper Nickel, among other venues. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award and has received additional fellowships and grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and Sewanee Writers Conference, among others. She lives in New Orleans.
Mark Yakich’s next collection, Spiritual Exercises, is forthcoming with Penguin in July 2019. He teaches at Loyola University New Orleans.
Why There Are Words – New Orleans (WTAW – NOLA) is a branch of the Why There Are Words reading series, founded in 2010 in Sausalito, and is a program of WTAW Press, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit publisher of literary books. WTAW – NOLA takes place quarterly on second Wednesdays and is curated by the writer Liz Green.
