Called “disturbing, edgy and provocative” by Book Magazine, Terese Svoboda’s work is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve and passion that she can address the direst subject. “She will, of course, compared to Willa Cather — and deservedly so,” wrote Kurt Andersen of her most recent novel, Bohemian Girl. A “fabulous fabulist” according to Publisher’s Weekly, Vogue lauded her first novel, Cannibal, as a female Heart of Darkness. “Astounding!” wrote the New York Post about her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. The author of thirteen books of poetry, prose, and memoir, Svoboda is also the recipient of the Bobst Prize (for Cannibal), the Iowa Prize for poetry, and the O. Henry Award for the short story. Svoboda’s work has been selected for the “Writer’s Choice” column in the New York Times Book Review, a SPIN magazine book of the year, and one of the Voice Literary Supplement’s ten best reads. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.’s Disney Hall in 2005. The Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative, Slate, One Story, and Tin House have published her work. Svoboda has taught at Columbia’s School of the Arts, Bennington, the New School, Sarah Lawrence, Williams, Davidson College, the College of William and Mary, the Universities of Hawaii and Miami, Fairleigh Dickinson, and elsewhere.

Paul Kerschen‘s virtuosic debut dives into mythologies from around the world and brings back strange treasure. The Drowned Library is in a class all its own, and introduces a remarkable new writer. Paul Kerschen was born in 1978 and grew up in Tucson. He is a graduate of Stanford, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of California-Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in English literature. His writing has appeared in the Southern Review and the Quarterly Conversation, and has won awards including an Iowa Arts Fellowship and Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship. He lives in California.

Mark Wisniewski’s recently published second novel, Show Up, Look Good, has been likened by numerous reviewers to The Catcher in the Rye, Seinfeld, and Bright Lights, Big City. His first novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, was compared to Huckleberry Finn in a favorable review in the Los Angeles Times. Salman Rushdie chose a short story of Mark’s to appear in Best American Short Stories 2008, and Mark’s short fiction has also been published in The Southern Review, Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, Fiction International, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, Glimmer Train, Fiction, The Gettysburg Review, The Sun, and dozens of other literary magazines. He’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize, two Regents’ Fellowships in Fiction from the University of California, an Isherwood Foundation Fellowship in Fiction, the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story for 2006, and a Tobias Wolff Award.

Jessica Keener’s fiction has been listed in The Pushcart Prize under “Outstanding Writers” and published in numerous literary reviews. Writing awards include a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant Program, a Joan Jakobson Scholarship from Wesleyan Writers Conference; a Chekhov Prize for Excellence in Fiction by the editors of Wilderness House Literary Review; and second prize in Redbook magazine’s fiction contest. For more than a dozen years she’s also been a features writer for The Boston Globe, Design New England, O, the Oprah Magazine and other national magazines. Night Swim is her debut novel.

Christine Lee Zilka is the Editor-at-Large at Kartika Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as ZYZZYVA, Verbsap, Yomimono, and Men Undressed: Women Authors Write About Male Sexual Experience. She was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook in 2006, placed as a finalist in Poets and Writers Magazine’s Writers Exchange Contest in 2007, and received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open in 2009.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is a writer for New Perspectives Theater, which produced her play Quimera on the Storm in September 2010, and has been the recipient of a Horace Goldsmith Grant, given so she could complete her first novel, which deals with her experiences as a Jew of mixed race. She has had upcoming and recent work in Pear Noir!, Camera Obscura, Slice Magazine, J Journal, Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary XXperimental Prose by Women Writers, Arts & Letters, Identity Envy— Wanting to be Who We Are Not, and The Texas Poetry Review. Recently produced plays include Don’t Call it Returning (Thespian Production, Joria Production Studios, Nov 2010); Owless of Santa Clara (Snorks and Pins, Roy Arias Studios, July 2010), Nikita (Shotgun Theater Festival, theGene Frankel Theatre, Jan 2009 and Thespian Productions, Producer’s Club, May 2009); Nary a Bodega (Leah Ryan Benefit, Producer’s Club, November 2009); The Amaranthine Thread (Leah Ryan Benefit, Producer’s Club, November 2009 and Where Eagles Dare, February 2010). She is currently finishing her first novel, which is entitled The Imitation of Crying, and has recently joined Vida: Women in Literary Arts as a co-editor for Her Kind (http://vidaweb.org/).

Elizabeth Searle is the author of three books of fiction (MY BODY TO YOU, A FOUR-SIDED BED and CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE) and a new novel, GIRL HELD IN HOME (2011). Her musical Tonya & Nancy: the Rock Opera has a new production in 2011. Her theater works have been featured on Good Morning America, CBS, CNN, NPR, the AP and more. Her novella CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE was produced as a film that premiered in 2010, with screenplay co-written by Elizabeth. She has published more than 30 stories in magazines. She teaches at Stonecoast MFA.

Kate Zambreno’s first published novel, O Fallen Angel, won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel — First Book Contest” and was named as one of the best books of 2010 by Bookslut. Another novel, Green Girl, is out this month from Emergency Press. Heroines, a critical memoir revolving around the women of modernism, some of which was incubated on her blog Frances Farmer is My Sister, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2012. She is a prose editor at Nightboat Books, and recently curated a series called Prose Event that interrogated the intersection of fiction and the essay for the Belladonna* Collaborative. Formerly a senior editor at Newcity magazine in Chicago, she currently lives in North Carolina.

MUSICAL GUESTS

Michael Indeglio and Tina Mathieu met in 2001 while attending The American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Though they took different artistic paths in the years post graduation, they’ve recently re-united to work on writing and recording a collection of original material. Tina can also be heard in the NYC group ‘Under The Elephant’ and Michael is still, occasionally, a resident of the theatrical universe. They are very excited to try out some of their newer music on your ear-holes.

Heather Fowler received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. She has taught composition, literature, and writing-related courses at UCSD, California State University at Stanislaus, and Modesto Junior College. Her work has been published online and in print in the US, England, Australia, and India, and appeared in such venues as Night Train, storyglossia, The Barcelona Review, PANK, Surreal South, JMWW, Prick of the Spindle, Short Story America and others, as well as having been nominated for both the storySouth Million Writers Award and Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, was recently featured at MiPOesias, The Nervous Breakdown, poeticdiversity, and The Medulla Review, and has been selected for a joint first place in the 2007 Faringdon Online Poetry Competition. Her debut story collection SUSPENDED HEART was released by Aqueous Books in December of 2010. A portion of her author’s proceeds will be donated to a local battered women’s charity in San Diego, CA.

Jen Michalski’s first collection of fiction, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, is available from So New (2007), her second is forthcoming from Dzanc (2013), and her novella MAY-SEPTEMBER (2010) was published by Press 53 as part of the Press 53 Open Awards. She also is the editor of the anthology CITY SAGES: BALTIMORE (CityLit Press 2010), which won a 2010 “Best of Baltimore” award from Baltimore Magazine. She is the founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww, and is co-host of the monthly reading series The 510 Readings in Baltimore.

Ethel Rohan is the author of Hard to Say, PANK, 2011 and Cut Through the Bone, Dark Sky Books, 2010, the latter named a 2010 Notable Story Collection by The Story Prize. Her work has or will appear in The Good Men Project, The Chattahoochee Review, Los Angeles Review, Potomac Review and Southeast Review Online among many others. She earned her MFA in fiction from Mills College, California. Raised in Dublin, Ireland, Ethel Rohan is now a resident of San Francisco, California. Visit her at ethelrohan.com.

Elizabeth Eslami is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her debut novel, Bone Worship (Pegasus, 2010), about the complex relationship between an Iranian father and his daughter, has been called “a treasure” by author David Haynes, and Janet Peery has called Eslami “a writer of uncommon wit and depth.” Her essays, short stories, and travel writing have appeared in numerous publications, including The Millions, Fifty-Two Stories, Matador, and The Literary Review, and she is a regular contributor to The Nervous Breakdown. Her work will be featured in the forthcoming anthologies Not in My Father’s House: An Anthology of Fiction By Iranian American Writers and Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Joseph Salvatore has published fiction and criticism in The Brooklyn Rail, Dossier Journal, H.O.W. Journal, LIT, New York Tyrant, Open City, Post Road, Salt Hill, Sleeping Fish, Willow Springs, 110 Stories (NYU Press, 2001), Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (2003). He is a regular fiction reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and an assistant professor at The New School — where, in 1997, he founded their literary journal, LIT, and in 2001, was awarded the University’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He lives in New York. His debut collection of short stories, To Assume a Pleasing Shape, will be published in November, 2011.

Dax-Devlon Ross is the author of six books including The Nightmare and the Dream: Nas, Jay-Z and the History of Conflict African-American Culture. His new crime novel, Make Me Believe, is based on the true life and trial of the last juvenile offender executed in the state of Texas. Using actual interviews with the accused, case documents, news articles and courtroom testimony, the novel blends fact and fiction to render a compassionate meditation on the power of conviction. Dax is also the co-publisher of Outside the Box Publishing, the editor of the politics and culture blog The HNIC Report, the co-founder of the pro basketball blog 3 From Deep.

Courtney Maum is a fiction writer and brand strategist based in between the Berkshires of Massachusetts and New York City. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Slice Magazine, Construction Magazine, The Agriculture Reader, Freerange Non-Fiction, Black Heart Magazine, Upstreet and Defenestration. She is currently working on performance-based comic fiction and deciding whether or not to join Google+. Procrastinate with her at Twitter.com/cmaum.