Monday, October 2, 2017

October 21st Readings: Betsy Boyd, A.G. Harmon, Garinè B. Isassi, and Karen Smythe, A.G

Karen Smythe's short-story collection Stubborn Bones was published by an imprint of Raincoast Books in British Columbia in 2001. Before that, PhD in English from the University of Toronto in hand, Karen published scholarly criticism and taught Canadian literature at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan. Several moves across Canada later--for stints including Continuing Education Director  in Nova Scotia, University Registrar in Prince Edward Island, and Policy Analyst in Ontario--Karen retired and enrolled in the Humber School of Writing correspondence program, where she completed an early draft of her first novel, This Side of Sad, under the mentorship of Governor General Award-winning author Diane Schoemperlen. Karen currently lives in Guelph, Ontario, where she is working on novel #2 from her fabulous writing shed. 




Garinè B. Isassi is the award–winning author of the novel Start with the Backbeat. She grew up with one foot in Texas and the other in New Jersey. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, she is a lover of music, chocolate, and altruistic sarcasm; a writer of post-punk humor; and the illustrious founder of Helicopter Moms Anonymous. She currently lives in Maryland with her family, where she works full-time, writes most of the time, and is the Workshops Chair for the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

A.G. Harmon’s fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Triquarterly, the Antioch Review, Shenandoah, the Bellingham Review, St. Katherine Review, Image, and Commonweal, among others. His fiction won the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize (A House All Stilled, University of Tennessee Press, 2002) and was the runner-up for the 2007 William Faulkner Prize for the Novel. His academic work, Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays was published by SUNY Press. He was a 2003 Walter Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He grew up on horse-and-cattle farms in Mississippi and Tennessee. Currently, he teaches at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.






Betsy Boyd is a fiction writer and journalist. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore, and is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council award, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Betsy’s fiction has been published most recently in SententiaShenandoahDel Sol Review, Eclectica and Loch Raven Review. Her short story "Scarecrow" received a Pushcart Prize.