Tuesday, July 12, 2016

August 8th Reading: Jessica Anya Blau, James Magruder, David Olimpio, and Stephen Zerance

Jessica Anya Blau’s latest novel, The Trouble with Lexie, is out now! Jessica is also the author of The Wonder Bread Summer; Drinking Closer to Home; and the national bestseller, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties. Jessica’s books have been featured on CNN, NPR, The Today Show and in Vanity Fair, Oprah.com, Cosmo, Bust and other national media. Jessica’s books have been optioned for film and television. Recently, Jessica ghost-wrote a memoir that is coming out with HarperColllins in the fall of 2016. Jessica grew up in Southern California and currently divides her time between Baltimore and New York.





James Magruder’s fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Subtropics, Bloom, The Normal School, Gargoyle, New Stories from the Midwest, and elsewhere. His début novel, Sugarless, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2010 William Saroyan International Writing Prize. His collection of stories, Let Me See It, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2014, and his novel, The Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, by Queens Ferry Press in 2016. His adaptations of works by Molière, Marivaux, Lesage, Labiche, Gozzi, Dickens, Hofmannsthal, and Giraudoux have been staged on and off-Broadway, across the country, and in Germany and Japan. He is a four-time fellow of the MacDowell Colony and his writing has also been supported by the Kenyon Playwrights Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where he was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction. He teaches dramaturgy at Swarthmore College and fiction at UB. Visit him at www.jamesmagruder.com.



David Olimpio grew up in Texas, but currently lives and writes in Northern New Jersey. He believes that we create ourselves through the stories we tell, and that is what he aims to do every day. Usually, you can find him driving his truck around the Garden State with his dogs. He has been published in Barrelhouse, The Nervous Breakdown, The Austin Review, Rappahannock Review, Crate, and others. His debut nonfiction collection THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION (Awst Press, 2016) wants your eyeballs. You can find more about him at davidolimpio.com, including links to his writing and photography. He Tweets, Instagrams, and Tumbles as @notsolinear and would love for you to join him.





Stephen Zerance is the author of the chapbook Caligula’s Playhouse (Mason Jar Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in West Branch, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Assaracus, and Knockout, among other journals, as well as on the websites of Lambda Literary and Split This Rock. He received his MFA from American University, where he received the Myra Sklarew award.