Join Why There Are Words on October 11, 2018, at Studio 333 in Sausalito for a special celebration when our WTAW Press authors Sarah Stone and Angela Mitchell will read from their brand new books, as part of a spectacular line up of authors, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Lisa Locascio, Louise Marburg, Natalie Singer, and Terese Svoboda.
Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10 entry fee at the door. The celebration will include cake, delectable treats, and adult beverages.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday, July 2018). Her essays and short stories have appeared in Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, she currently teaches writing to immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing artists into public schools. She is the book columnist for KQED.
Lisa Locascio‘s work has appeared in n+1, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. She is co-publisher of Joyland Magazine and editor of 7x7LA, as well as of the anthology Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California (Outpost 19, 2017). Her first novel, Open Me, was published in August 2018 by Grove Atlantic.
Louise Marburg is the author of the award-winning The Truth About Me: Stories (WTAW Press, 2017). Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review, and many other fine journals. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg.
Angela Mitchell’s stories have appeared in Colorado Review, New South, Carve, Midwestern Gothic, storySouth, Natural Bridge, and other journals. Her story, “Animal Lovers,” was awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction and was given special mention in The Pushcart Prize XXXV and noted as a distinguished story in the inaugural issue of New Stories from the Midwest. She holds degrees from the University of New Orleans, University of Arkansas, and University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing, and has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. She is an eighth generation native of southern Missouri, where she maintains a small farm on her family’s land, and resides in St. Louis with her husband and sons. Unnatural Habitats is her first book, published by WTAW Press (October 10, 2018).
Natalie Singer is the author of the memoir California Calling: A Self-Interrogation (Hawthorne Books, March 2018). Her writing has been published in The Rumpus, Proximity; Hypertext; Literary Mama; The Washington Post; Alligator Juniper; Brain, Child; Largehearted Boy; The Nervous Breakdown; Full Grown People; and the 2015 anthology Love and Profanity (Switch Press, 2015). She has been the recipient of several awards, including the Pacific Northwest Writers Association nonfiction prize and the Alligator Juniper nonfiction prize. California Calling was first runner-up for the Red Hen Press nonfiction prize and a finalist for the Autumn House Press nonfiction prize. She has taught writing inside Washington State’s psychiatric facility for youth and Seattle’s juvenile detention center, and has worked as a journalist at newspapers around the West. She holds an MFA in creative writing and poetics from the University of Washington. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Seattle.
Sarah Stone’s latest book is Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel, forthcoming from WTAW Press October 10, 2018. Her novel The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday, 2002) has been taught in courses on literature, ethics, and the rhetoric of human rights. The novel was a BookSense 76 selection, has been translated into German and Dutch, and was included in Geoff Wisner’s A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books That Capture the Spirit of Africa (Jacana Media, 2008). She’s the co-author, with her spouse and writing partner Ron Nyren, of the textbook Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (Pearson, 2004). Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Ploughshares; StoryQuarterly; The Believer; The Millions; The Writer’s Chronicle; Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope (Rutgers University Press, 2009); and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft (Trinity University Press, 2011), among other places. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Terese Svoboda, a Guggenheim fellow, is the author of 18 books, including seven books of poetry. Among her recent works are Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (Schaffner Press, Inc., 2016) and Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship (Eyewear Publishing, 2016). Her collection of stories, Great American Desert will be published in 2019. She has won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry Award for the short story, a Bobst prize for the novel, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is a three-time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Yaddo, McDowell, and Bellagio residencies. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.’s Disney Hall in 2005. Her collection of stories, Great American Desert will be published in 2019. Her visit to the Bay Area by is made possible in part by Headlands Center for the Arts.
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.
