HAZEL RETURNS THIS SUNDAY AT 5 pm.
Our September reading features guest reader Toni Mirosevich along with:
Aimee Phan nominated by Marie Mockett
Donika Ross nominated by Jill Schepmann
Deborah Steinberg nominated by Sandra Wassilie
Huda Almarashi nominated by Ayesha Nura
& special addition Vanessa Hua
We will be celebrating with champagne, wine, and pastries courtesy of Arizmendi at the CIIS campus in SoMA. Find us on the 5th floor.
About the readers
Toni Mirosevich is the author of six collections of poetry and prose, including a book of nonfiction stories, Pink Harvest, winner the First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her multi-genre work has been anthologized in Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Best American Travel Writing, The Gastronomica Reader, The Discovery of Poetry, AutoBioDiversity: True Stories from Zyzzyva and elsewhere. Notable Mention in Best American Essays, 2013. New work appeared recently in Pleiades, North American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly, Fourth Genre. These stories and others are included in her new manuscript “Murderer’s Bread”–a finalist for the 2014 Spokane Prize in Short Fiction. She is an ever grateful recipient of writers residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Djerassi Resident Artists Program among others and is currently a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Aimee Phan is the author of the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong and the story collection We Should Never Meet, both published by St. Martin’s Press. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Salon and The Rumpus, among others. Her fellowships and residencies include the National Endowment of the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial/ Money for Women Fund, Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell Arts Colony and Hedgebrook. She currently teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Donika Ross Kelly is the author of american taxonomies, selected by Nikky Finney for the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2013, she received a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2004 June Fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, Indiana Review.
Huda Al-Marashi is an Iraqi-American at work on a memoir about the impact of her dual-identity on her marriage. Excerpts from this memoir have appeared in the anthologies Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of Muslim American Women, Becoming: What Makes a Woman, In Her Place, and Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women and Extreme Religion, a collection that theWashington Post listed among the best nonfiction for 2013. Other works have appeared in The Rumpus Funny Women Column and the anthology Rust Belt Chic. She is the recipient of a 2012 Cuyahoga County Creative Workforce Fellowship and a 2015 Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writer Fellowship.
Deborah Steinberg’s writing has been published in Necessary Fiction, The Red Line, Monkeybicycle, riverbabble, great weather for MEDIA, and other journals. She is a founding editor of Red Bridge Press and is the fiction editor of the press’s online journal Rivet: the Journal of Writing that Risks. Deborah lives in San Francisco, where she works as a freelance editor, facilitates writing workshops with a focus on healing, serves on the board of the literary reading series Bay Area Generations, and sings in the vocal ensemble Conspiracy of Venus.
Vanessa Hua received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, FRONTLINE/World, PRI’s The World, The Atlantic, Guernica, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Previously, she was a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Hartford Courant, and has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, and Panama. She was a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing and a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award for Fiction. Her debut short story collection, winner of the Willow Books Literature Awards Grand Prize, will be published in 2016. She works and teaches at the Writers’ Grotto in San Francisco, and blogs at threeunderone.blogspot.com