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.

Photos from Featherless #13

Edward Gauvin

Kate Durbin

Camille Roy

Thanks to everyone for coming out.  Our next event will be March 9th.

Featherless #13

February's Featherless surprises and delights.  On the lineup: Edward Gauvin, Kate Durbin, and Camille Roy.  On February 10th, 2012, at 8 pm, join us at Stories Books & Cafe for a literary evening. 

Bios to follow:

The winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright Program, the Centre National du Livre, and the American Literary Translators' Association. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010) won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Other translations have appeared in Tin House, Subtropics, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, AGNI Online, and PEN America. The contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, he translates comics for Top Shelf, Archaia, and Lerner.

Writing under the name H.V. Chao, his fiction has previously been published in Epiphany, Nanoism, and Diet Soap. He is a first year fiction PhD student at USC.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist. Her books include The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), E! Entertainment (Insert/Blanc Press Diamond Edition, forthcoming), Gaga Stigmata (Zg Press, forthcoming), The Fashion Issue (Zg Press, forthcoming), and, with Amaranth Borsuk, ABRA (Zg Press, forthcoming).

Camille Roy is a writer and performer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her book, Sherwood Forest came out in 2011 from Futurepoem. She co-edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, a book of essays by writers on their own experimental practices (CoachHouse). Her books include Cheap Speech, a play, from Leroy, and Craquer, a fictional autobiography from 2^nd Story Books , as well as Swarm (two novellas, Black Star Series). Earlier books include The Rosy Medallions (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St Press) and Cold Heaven (plays, from Leslie Scalapino's O Books). She was a founding editor of the online journal Narrativity (http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity). Roy has taught creative writing in multiple genres and forms at several institutions, including San Francisco State University, California State University SummerArts, and Naropa.

Exciting!  Exciting!