Please plan to join WTAW – NYC on Sunday, November 5, at 6 pm at the Bowery Poetry Club for the next Why There Are Words-NYC reading, which will feature the work of Helen Benedict, Owen Lewis, Susan Lewis, Meghan O’Rourke, Louise Marburg, and Sarah Van Arsdale. Hosted by poet and professor Michael Collins. Doors open at 5:45 pm; readings begin at 6:00 sharp. $10.00 at the door or $8 in advance. You can purchase discounted advance tickets here.
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven novels, including her latest, Wolf Season, and Sand Queen, which was named a Best Contemporary War Novel by Publishers Weekly. A recipient of the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, among other awards, she is also the author of five works of nonfiction, including The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women in Iraq, as well as a play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues. Originally from the UK, she moved to the US for graduate school and has lived and worked here ever since. Her writings on soldiers inspired a suit against the Pentagon and the Oscar-nominated film, The Invisible War.
Owen Lewis is the author of two collections of poetry, Marriage Map (finalist 2017 Rubery Book Award) and Sometimes Full of Daylight, and two chapbooks including Best Man, winner of the 2016 Jean Pendrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. Recent honors include first prize in the 2016 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, finalist for the 2017 Pablo Neruda Award from Nimrod International Literary Journal, second prize in the 2017 Paumantok Award from Farmingdale State College and short-listing in The 2017 International Gregory O’Donoghue Prize. He is a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and teaches with the Narrative Medicine group.
Susan Lewis is the author of nine books and chapbooks, most recently Heisenberg’s Salon, This Visit, How to be Another, and State of the Union. Her tenth book, Zoom, is the winner of the 2017 Washington Prize and will be published by The Word Works Press in 2018. Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and journals such as The Awl, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review, Cimarron, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Raritan, Seneca Review, Verse, Verse Daily, and VOLT. Susan lives in New York City and edits Posit, an online journal of literature and art.
Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the poetry collections Sun in Days, Once, and Halflife. She is also the bestselling author of The Long Goodbye. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and other awards, she teaches at the writing programs at NYU and Princeton.
Louise Marburg’s collection of short stories, The Truth About Me, was published in 2017 by WTAW Press. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her stories have appeared in such publications as The Louisville Review, Slippery Elm, Bayou, The Lascaux Review Prize Anthology, Day One, The Carolina Quarterly, Folio, and others. She lives in SoHo with her husband, the painter Charles Marburg.
Sarah Van Arsdale’s fifth book, and first book of poetry, The Catamount, was published by Nomadic Press in 2017. Her most recent book of fiction is a collection of novellas entitled In Case of Emergency, Break Glass (Queen’s Ferry Press). Both are illustrated with her watercolors. Her novels are Grand Isle, (SUNY Press 2012), Blue, winner of the 2002 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel (University of Tennessee Press), and Toward Amnesia (1996, Riverhead Books). She serves on the board of the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction, curates the Bloom reading series, and teaches in the Antioch University MFA Program and at NYU.
Why There Are Words – NYC is a newish branch of the award-winning Bay Area reading series and is affiliated with the independent press, WTAW Press. The Bowery Poetry Club is located at 308 Bowery just north of Houston. Phone: (212) 614-0505. For more information contact Michael Collins.
