The Virginia Festival of the Book partners with us this month for a special reading series featuring Morgan Parker, Clare Beams, and Belle Boggs! Friday, March 24th. 7:00pm at the Bridge PAI (209 Monticello Road). Always free & open to the public. Complimentary refreshments at intermission, including local wine from our friends at Stinson Vineyards.
Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, which was selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, The New York Times, and The Nation, among others. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is an Editor for Day One and Little A, and the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel in New York. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.
Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, a finalist for the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Fiction. Her stories appear in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, the Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and have received special mention in The Best American Short Stories 2013 and The Pushcart Prize XXXV. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and currently blogs for Ploughshares. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative writing at Saint Vincent College and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, a nonfiction book that will be published in September 2016 by Graywolf Press. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize, the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Belle’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, Slate, Orion, Ecotone, and other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
