Tuesday, February 18, 2014

March 31st Readings: Pamela Erens, John Rowell, and Jennifer Lee, 7 pm

Pamela Erens’s second novel, The Virgins, published by Tin House Books, was heralded by John Irving in The New York Times Book Review as "flawlessly executed and irrefutably true." It was named a Best Book of 2013 by The New Yorker, The New Republic, Library Journal, and Salon. Pamela's debut novel, The Understory, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. It will be reissued on April 15 by Tin House Books. Pamela’s short fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in a wide variety of literary, cultural, and mainstream publications, including Chicago Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The New York Times, and Elle.
John Rowell is the author of the short story collection The Music of Your Life, a finalist for the 2004 Ferro-Grumley Prize for Best Fiction Book of the Year. His stage adaptation of his book, with the same title, opened at the Jermyn Street Theater in London’s West End in November of 2010, and was a 2012 semi-finalist at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference. A native of North Carolina, John holds a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Writing and Literature from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. His fiction, essays, and reviews have been featured in such publications as Tin House, Bloom, Theatermania, and Show Business Weekly, among others. Most recently, John was represented with a story in Long Story Short: Flash Fiction From Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers, published by UNC Press, and he is currently at work on a novel entitled People Come and Go So Quickly Here.

Jennifer Lee is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins MA Writing Program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in JMWW, Brink Magazine, The Potomac Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Cobalt. Her work has won the Maryland Writers’ Association short fiction prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She recently finished writing a novel and is hard at work on a pair of novellas and a looming science fiction trilogy. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.