Featherless #17

Please join us for Featherless #17, which will take place on Friday, June 8, at 8pm at Stories Books & Cafe in Echo Park. Our readers are Michelle Joyner, Ofelia del Corazon, and Dana Johnson.

Michelle Joyner has been a professional actress her entire adult life, and is proud to say that she has never had a day job. Of course, Government Assistance was helpful in achieving that status. She has played a wide range of roles in television, theater and movies. Thru out her career, Michelle has had a simple goal: To live until the third act, and though that dream was seldom realized, she is still recognized today as the girl that Sylvester Stallone dropped 4000 feet off a mountain top in CLIFFHANGER. She took a decade long hiatus from dying on screen that ended just recently, during which she raised twin boys and wrote 8 studio screenplays, now sitting on 8 studio shelves.  She most recently guest starred on “Lie to Me” and “Bones” (Fox) and has segued seamlessly from playing the victim to currently playing the victim’s mother. Michelle has always performed other people’s words, or written words for other people to perform, and is now out trying out saying the words in public that she wrote, just for something new.  And she gets to live.

Ofelia del Corazon is a writer, macho femme and profesional pervert. She is a founding member of the Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival and the curator of the "Naughty Bits" Erotic Film Shorts Program. She likes to watch videos of the artists she admires most (alone on repeat in her dark bedroom) then plot schemes to trick them into being her best friends forever and ever. These creepy schemes usually include organizing performances or screenings and writing about their work. She keeps a queer arts and culture blog at mommyfiercest.com

Dana Johnson's debut novel Elsewhere, California will be published June 12 by Counterpoint Press. It has received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and garnered advance praise from writers like T.C Boyle, Michelle Huneven, Oscar Hijuelos, and Aimee Bender. Dana is also is the author of the short story collection Break Any Woman Down, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, California, Dana is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. For more info on Dana, visit: www.danajohnsonauthor.com

Photos from Featherless #16

Stacy Elaine Dacheux reads "1994"

Nikki Darling reads from Fade Into You

 

William Dickerson reads from No Alternative

Come to our next event, June 8, with Dana Johnson, Ofelia Del Corazon and Michelle Joyner!

Featherless #16

Stacy Elaine Dacheux, Nikki Darling and William Dickerson will spin stories May 11, at 8pm at Stories Books & Cafe.  Threads of 1990s-era music weave with memoir and new manuscripts. We're excited to listen!

Stacy Elaine Dacheux spent half her childhood outside Boston, getting beat on by tough girls. The other half was spent outside Birmingham, getting beat on by Southern Baptists. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she gets beat on by life. With Paris Lia, she co-edits Slack Lust, a literary magazine dedicated to cultural investigations, and co-hosts a correlating night of live music and readings at Hotel Cafe. As a visual artist, she translates handwritten letters into abstract paintings, a collection of which will be traveling to Massachusetts in September. Recent writing has appeared in Thuggery & Grace and is forthcoming in The Destroyer.

Nikki Darling's music criticism appears regularly in LA Times and LA Weekly. Her essay Appropriate for Destruction was included in Best Music Writing 2010. 

She received her MFA in Critical Studies from California Institute of the Art's and just completed an epic novel about Harrison Ford and Oedipus Rex. 

William Dickerson graduated from The College of The Holy Cross with a degree in English and received his Masters of Fine Arts in Directing from The American Film Institute. He is a writer/director whose work has been recognized by film festivals across the country and who recently completed his debut feature film, DETOUR. NO ALTERNATIVE is his first novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rachel, and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Duet. For more info, visit: http://www.facebook.com/noalternative.novel

Please join us as the seasons turn to spring. This time, a coat may be less necessary.

Photos from Featherless #15

Karineh Mahdessian reads various poems

David Kukoff reads "Coyotes"

Stacy Gnall reads from Heart First Into the Forest

Featherless #15

Exciting writers for Featherless #15: Karineh Mahdessian, David Kukoff and Stacy Gnall will enthrall and enchant.  The reading is at 8pm on April 13, at Stories Books & Café.

karineh mahdessian learned english by reading nancy drew books and watching married with children.  she has a great affinity for really large earrings. she enjoys tacos from highland park taco trucks.  she will challenge anyone to a thumbwrestling match. anytime.  anyplace.   she always has her chess set riding around in the trunk of her car.  and she is absolutely in love with haikus.

David Kukoff is a Los Angeles native who has been writing for film and television since 1991.  His highlights include writing a movie for a post-'N Sync/pre-"Social Network" Justin Timberlake and selling a major spec script about anorexic Valley Girls who undergo a radical diet treatment and emerge as flesh-eating zombies.  Following a wonderful four-year stint teaching film and television writing at Northwestern University in Chicago, he is back on the West Coast full-time where he is working on a book of short stories-slash-novel about growing up in 1970's Los Angeles.

Stacy Gnall is the author of Heart First into the Forest (Alice James Books, 2011). She earned her undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA at the University of Alabama, and she is currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is originally from Cleveland, Ohio and currently lives in Los Angeles.

Photos from Featherless #14

Ryan Shoemaker reads from "After All the Fun We Had"

Linda Lay reads from "Star Shoes"

Bart Edelman reads from The Geographer's Wife

Thanks for coming.  Our next event is April 13, currently booking.  Stay tuned.

Featherless #14

Ryan Shoemaker, Linda Lay and Bart Edelman will read on March 9th at 8pm at Stories Books & Cafe.  Judging from current conditions there may be a chill and it may be damp, so bring your woolens.

Bios:

Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Ryan Shoemaker is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Santa Monica Review, Grist: A Journal for Writers, Hawai’i Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West.  Ryan lives in Burbank, California with his wife, Jennifer, and two children, Kieran and Haven.  He once shared a plate of bacon with George Saunders in an Athens, Ohio café.

Linda Lay received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and continued her studies at Otis College of Art and Design, where she received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Currently she earns a living as a fashion designer, occasional house sitter and as a teacher of art and writing at an alternative private high school. She’s also a regular contributor to a pop-culture blog called FruitFlyLife.com. Her art and short fiction has been featured in the literary magazines: Sprung Formal, The Black Boot and most recently at SlackLust.com.

Bart Edelman is currently a professor of English at Glendale College, where he edits Eclipse, A Literary Journal. His poetry appears frequently in newspapers and journals, as well as in textbooks and anthologies published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Harcourt Brace, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, and Wadsworth. He teaches poetry workshops across the United States and was poet-in-residence at Monroe College of the State University at New York. Collections of his work include Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press, 1993), Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Press, 1996), The Alphabet of Love (Red Hen Press, 1999), The Gentle Man (Red Hen Press, 2001), and The Last Mojito (Red Hen Press, 2005). He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and currently resides in Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press published his latest collection of poetry, The Geographer’s Wife, in Spring 2012.