August 24 Readings: Jen Grow, Jerry Gabriel, Michelle Brafman, and Nate Brown

Jen Grow’s debut collection, My Life as a Mermaid, won the 2012 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Competition. She is the Fiction Editor of Little Patuxent Review. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Other Voices, The Sun Magazine, The GSU Review, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review and many others including the anthology City Sages: Baltimore (City Lit Press, 2010). She’s received two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and her stories have earned nominations for Best New American Voices and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Baltimore with the artist Lee Stierhoff and their zoo of cats and dogs. 

Michelle Brafman is the author of the novel Washing the Dead. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, Lillith Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Gargoyle, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing at the John Hopkins MA in Writing Program. 

Jerry Gabriel’s first book, Drowned Boy (Sarabande, 2010), won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. It was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and awarded the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His second book, The Let Go, a collection of long stories, was published in May by Queen’s Ferry Press. He lives in Maryland, where he teaches at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and directs the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference. 

Nate Brown’s fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Five Chapters, the Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of American Short Fiction and has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Vermont Studio Center, the Ucross Foundation, and multiple work-study scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He lives in Baltimore.