{About}

Sunday Salon is a prose reading series and online magazine. Based in New York City and founded by Nita Noveno in the summer of 2002, Sunday Salon swept through the Midwest to Chicago in 2006 thanks to Melanie Pappadis. In 2007 Sunday Salon launched an online zine to showcase the prose of it's alumni and up and coming writers.

New York City

Nita Noveno and co-host/fellow New School grad Caroline Berger keep a refreshing blend of new and experienced literary voices on tap at Stain Bar every third Sunday of the month and online in the Sunday Salon zine.

Nita Noveno and Caroline Berger

Nita Noveno

Nita is a graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program. She founded the Sunday Salon series in the summer of 2002. She has most recently been published in Lost and Found: An Anthology of Teachers Writing and Worldview and was a finalist for the Missouri Review's 2005 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Nita read at the July 2002 Salon.

Caroline Berger

Caroline lives in up-and-coming Bed Stuy (she's waiting patiently). Her proetry (that's not a typo; she likes to make up her own genres) has appeared most recently on La Petite Zine and Pindeldyboz and in Barrow Street. She is the co-host of the Sunday Salon and once used all 7 letters in a game of Scrabble to spell e-t-i-o-l-a-t-e. She teaches writing at The New School & has recently succumb to the world of blogging: Apocalyptic Whimsy.
Krista Madsen

Krista Madsen

Krista is a graduate of the New School MFA Creative Writing Program. She and her bar have quite kindly adopted us. She is the author of the novels Degas Must Have Loved a Dancer and Four Corners and the web mistress of readingdivas.com. Krista read at the October 2002 Salon.
Craig and Caroline

Craig and Caroline

Caroline is an actor and musician who actively performs for two theatre companies both in Miami and New York. Craig is a visual artist and musician who has displayed his art in both New York and abroad in Japan and Paris. Together they enjoy marriage and working together as the managers of Stain Bar. They can also be found playing music together around Brooklyn in the band Tin Veil and are excited to announce the release of a new album this summer.

Chicago

Chicago Stage

Melanie Pappadis

Melanie Pappadis received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her fiction was recently nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize. Her work has received a variety of mentions including winner of The New Schoolʼs Fiction Chapbook Competition, finalist in Sarabande Booksʼ Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction, and one of twenty-five winners in Glimmer Trainʼs Very Short Fiction Contest. She has published a book of non-fiction, Limbu Folklore, a collection of translated oral folklore and photographs from her field research in Nepal. She currently lives with her husband and son in Chicago where she teaches creative writing and is working on a collection of stories along with her second novel. Melanie read at the September 2002 New York Salon. She started up the Chicago series in 2006.

Mike Zapata

Mike is a writer and educator living in Chicago. He is co-founder, co-publisher, and fiction editor for MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine. He is a graduate of the Second City Writer's Training Program, where he was co-founder of the sketch comedy troupe Grandma June's Sewing Circle. He has produced and written for revues at Second City's Donny's Skybox, The Viaduct, The Trap Door Theater, and the Apollo Theater Chicago, and is also co-creator, co-writer of a television pilot entitled Settling Up. He also writes fiction and is currently working on a collection of stories based in Chicago.

Nairobi

In the spring 2007, Salon opened in Nairobi via a transatlantic connection established between Salon founder, Nita Noveno, and Kwani? Readings founder, June Wanjiru Wainaina. Since then, Salon Nairobi has grown into a unique, well-rounded gathering that not only engages the audience, but leaves one with a sense of pride at the achievements of Kenyan writers in reflecting the rights, and the wrongs of the Kenya they live in and love.

June Wanjiru Wainaina

Few achievements give her more pleasure than that of having brought to life literary liaisons that are now a key feature throughout Nairobi. Founder of the kwani? Readings as far back as 2003, and thereafter the kwani? Poetry Open Mic, June Wanjiru Wainaina hosts the Sunday Salon, Nairobi, held every third Sunday of the month at Kengeles, Lavington Green. In another life she was a technocrat, having developed the curricullum for and taught a six-month course in Computer Repairs and Maintenance at Egerton University in Nakuru, Kenya.