Agenda
Posterboard 
Month 
Week 
Day June 2013
A Night with PEN American Center
Featuring:
EDWIDGE DANTICAT (Brother, I’m Dying, The Dew Breaker)
MATT BELL (In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods)
AMY BRILL (The Movement of Stars)
MATTHEW AARON GOODMAN (Hold Love Strong)
What happens when a women compromises her dreams and ambitions for a life she never expected or desired? In her fifth book, The Woman Upstairs, award-winning novelist Claire Messud explores the pain and anger of elementary school teacher Nora Eldridge, a good neighbor and friend who keeps finding herself on the fringe of others’ accomplishments as she fervently searches for a sense of self. In conversation with Michael Ravitch, editor of The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know. This event is free to CBE members/$10 suggested donation from the public. RSVP by going to http://congregationbethelohim.org/brooklynbythebook
Join us to celebrate two highly anticipated books, Matt Bell’s novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a story about the desire for a child, a crumbling marriage, and the strange world the couple builds and cannot escape from; and Norman Lock’s adventurous collection Love Among the Particles, in which Lock delves into the mysterious lives of classic characters like Tom Sawyer, Mata Hari, Jules Verne, and spins new fantastical tales about them.
Matt Bell‘s first collection of stories, How They Were Found, was published in 2010, including the story “Dredge,” selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2010, and the story “His Last Great Gift,” shortlisted for Best American Short Stories 2010 and the Pushcart Prize anthology. In 2012, Bell published Cataclysm Baby, a novella. Bell’s epic, mythical debut novel, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, was published by Soho Press in Spring 2013. Bell’s fiction has been published in Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and many other literary magazines, and has been anthologized in 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers and Best American Fantasy 2. He has worked as the Senior Editor at Dzanc Books, and is the editor of The Collagist. He lives in Marquette, Michigan, with his wife Jessica, where he teaches creative writing at Northern Michigan University.
Scott Garson was born in Nebraska and grew up in Iowa. A graduate of Carleton College and George Mason University, he has received awards for his fiction from Playboy, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation and Dzanc Books. He lives in central Missouri with his wife and two children.
Elliott Holt’s short fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, and she was the runner-up of the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. A graduate of the MFA program at Brooklyn College , she has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, and Yaddo. Holt is a former copywriter who has worked at advertising agencies in Moscow, London, and New York. She currently resides in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Find her on Twitter @ElliottHolt.
Leigh Newman’s memoir Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-up World, One Long Journey Home came out from Dial Press in 2013. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in One Story, Tin House, The New York Times Modern Love section, Fiction, New York Tyrant, Vogue, Real Simple, O The Oprah Magazine, and Bookforum. She is the deputy editor of Oprah.com where she writes about books and happiness, and an editor-at-large for the indie press Black Balloon Publishing.
MUSICAL GUEST:
Since 2011 Bridget Davis and her band the Viking Kings have brought their potent blend of jazz, folk, and pop to music venues through Manhattan and Brooklyn. Featuring fellow University of Miami graduates Sam Petitti on guitar and Dag Markhus on drums, as well as the jazz- and classically-trained Kells Nollenberger on upright bass, the Viking Kings expertly supply each song with its own unique cinematic atmosphere–romance, western, period drama, film noir. Following the 2012 release of their debut EP Trouble Comes in Threes, produced and engineered by Luke Moellman and mastered by Latin Grammy-winning Carlos Alvarez, Bridget Davis and the Viking Kings have been played on Miami’s 90.5 WVUM and featured as a “Must See Show of the Week” by Grass Clippings. But listen to them once, and every show will be a must see show.
Michael Reynolds is the Editor in chief of Europa Editions, where he has worked with authors such as Alina Bronsky, Rebecca Connell, Alessandro Piperno, Amelie Nothomb, Richard Beard, Zane Lovitt, and Jonathan Grimwood. He is also an author and a translator. His published translations include three crime novels by Carlo Lucarelli, Daniele Mastrogiacomo’s Days of Fear, and Viola Di Grado’s prize-winning novel 70% Acrylic 30% Wool. He was born in Australia in 1968 and now lives in New York.
Jason Pinter is the Senior Marketing Manager for Grove/Atlantic and Mysterious Press, as well as the bestselling author of five thrillers (the most recent of which are The Fury and The Darkness). His novel for young readers, Zeke Bartholomew: Superspy!, was published in November 2011. www.jasonpinter.com.
Dennis Johnson, along with his wife, Valerie Merians, is the founder and publisher of one of America’s leading independent publishing houses, Melville House. He has published, among others, Nobel Prize winners Imre Kertesz and Heinrich Boll, and the final books of Anna Politkovskaya and Jacques Derrida. His rediscovery of German writer Hans Fallada led to a world-wide phenomenon, and his publication of Debt: The First 5,000 Yearswon Melville House the 2012 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Johnson is also the founder of MobyLives, one of the book industry’s first and most popular literary webzines. Prior to becoming a publisher, Johnson graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop and was a much-anthologized fiction writer, whose work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He is the author of the book The Big Chill: The Great, Unreported Story of the Bush Inauguration Protest, and the editor, with Valerie Merians, of the anthologies Poetry After 9/11 and What We Do Now.
Richard Nash is the Vice President of Community and Content of Small Demons and publisher of Red Lemonade. In 2005, he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing for his work at Soft Skull Press. In 2009, Utne Reader named him one of “Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World.”
VQR Advisory Board member Amy O’Leary is a reporter and former editor with the New York Times who has worked across a range of sections considering the digital application of journalism at a story’s earliest conception. Prior to the Times, she was a producer at This American Life.
Kevin Young is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, which won an American Book Award. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing & English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.