August 25 Readings: Michael Kimball, Sarah Pinsker, and Matthew Zingg

Michael Kimball is the author of seven books, including Galaga, Big Ray, and Dear Everybody. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" and in Vice, as well as in The Guardian and Bomb.

Sarah Pinsker's novelette "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind," won the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, the Baltimore City Paper, and more, and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, and The Future Embodied. She co-hosts the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's Dangerous Voices Variety Hour, a reading series/quiz show. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

July 7th Readings: Paula Bomer, Michael Downs, and Megan Stielstra

(All Starts Here! events begin at 7 pm)

Paula Bomer is the author of the collection, Inside Madeleine (Soho Press, May 2014), the novel Nine Months (Soho Press, August 2012), which received exuberant reviews in The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and elsewhere. Her collection, Baby and Other Stories (Word Riot Press, December 2010), received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, calling it a “lacerating take on marriage and motherhood…not one to share with the Mommy and Me group”, Kirkus Review deemed it “a worthy, if challenging, entry into the genre of transgressional fiction”, and O Magazine referred to it as a “brilliant, brutally raw debut.” Links to various work, interviews and more can be found here. She also is the publisher of Sententia Books and edits Sententia: The Literary Journal.

Michael Downs is the author of The Greatest Show (Louisiana State University Press), a collection of linked stories featuring the famous Hartford Circus Fire of 1944, in which a circus tent burned during a matinee killing more than 150 people. His first book book, House of Good Hope (University of Nebraska Press), won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His recent fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, New Letters, River Teeth, The Kenyon Review, and AARP: The Magazine. A former newspaper reporter, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. He lives in Baltimore’s Hamilton neighborhood, and teaches at Towson University.

Megan Stielstra is the author of Once I Was Cool, Everyone Remain Calm and the Literary Director of the 2nd Story storytelling series. She’s told stories for all sorts of theaters, festivals, and bars including The Goodman, The Steppenwolf, and The Museum of Contemporary Art. Her writing has appeared in Best American Essays 2013, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

May 12th Readings: Lisa Gornick, Gabriel Brownstein, Mary Kay Zuravleff, Stephen Dixon

Please join us for this special segment of Starts Here! at the Artifact hosted by author Jane Delury!

Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of stories, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award) and a novel, The Man from Beyond (a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice). His short fiction has recently appeared or will soon appear in Agni, Glimmer Train, The Harvard Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. He teaches at St. John's University in Queens, New York.

Stephen Dixon was born in 1936 in New York City. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1958 and is a retired faculty member of Johns Hopkins University. He is also a two-time National Book Award nominee, for his novels Frog and Interstate. He still hammers out his fiction on a vintage typewriter. His latest novel is His Wife Leaves Him.

Lisa Gornick is the author of two novels: Tinderbox and A Private Sorcery. Her stories and essays have appeared widely, including in Agni, Prairie Schooner and The Sun, and have received many awards. She holds a B.A. from Princeton, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at NYU and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia. A collection of linked stories, Louisa Meets Bear, is forthcoming.

Mary Kay Zuravleff's latest novel, Man Alive!, was chosen as a 2013 Notable Book by The Washington Post, which called it "a family novel for smart people." People Magazine praised its "impressive intelligence and sly humor." Her first novel, The Frequency of Souls, was hailed by The Chicago Tribune as "a beguiling and wildly inventive debut novel," and The New York Times deemed her second book, The Bowl Is Already Broken, "a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world." Honors for her work include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the James Jones Award. Mary Kay lives in Washington, DC, where she serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a co-founder of the DC Women Writers Group.

April 28th Readings: Maud Casey, D. Foy, and Joseph Riippi

Maud Casey is the author of the novels The Man Who Walked Away, The Shape of Things to Come (a New York Times Notable Book), and Genealogy; and a collection of stories, Drastic. She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize and has received fellowships from the Fundación Valparaiso, Hawthornden International Writers Retreat, Château de Lavigny, Dora Maar, and the Passa Porta residency at Villa Hellebosch. Casey teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in Washington, D.C.

D. Foy is the author of the novel Made to Break. His story, “Barnacles of the Fuzz,” appeared in Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, edited by Cal Morgan. His essay on the American laundromat came out in Snorri Bros.’s Laundromat, an homage in photographs to the laundromats of New York City (powerHouse Books). His work has appeared in Revolver and in Post Road, along with other work in Frequencies, Salon, The Literary Review, The Georgia Review, and BOMB, to name a few. He lives in Brooklyn.

Joseph Riippi is the author of A Cloth House, The Orange Suitcase, and Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! and a chapbook called Treesisters. His latest is Puyallup, Washington (an interrogation), from Publishing Genius Press, and two novels will come out in 2014 from Civil Coping Mechanisms, Because, and Research (A Novel for Performance). He lives with his wife in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

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.

February 10th, 7 pm: Jane Delury, Rob Roberge, and Gina Frangello

Jane Delury’s fiction has appeared in publications including The Southern Review, Narrative, The Yale Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She is the Klein Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Baltimore.






Rob Roberge is the author of four books of fiction: The Cost of Living (Other Voices Books 2013), Working Backwards From the Worst Moment of My Life (Red Hen 2010), More Than They Could Chew (Harper Perennial 2005) and Drive (Hollyridge 2001). A core faculty member at UCR/Palm Desert’s MFA, his stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He plays guitar and sings with the LA bands The Danbury Shakes and The Urinals. www.robroberge.com





Gina Frangello is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010) and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006). She is the Sunday editor for The Rumpus and the fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, and is on faculty at UCR-Palm Desert's low residency MFA program in Creative Writing. The longtime Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and Other Voices Books, she now runs Other Voices Queretaro (www.othervoicesqueretaro.com), an international writing program. She can be found at www.ginafrangello.com