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.