April 25th Readings: Robert Lopez, Sam Ligon, Gregg Wilhelm, and Elizabeth Gonzalez

Elizabeth Gonzalez’s debut story collection, The Universal Physics of Escape, won the 2015 Press 53 Short Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the Midwest, SolLit Selects, Greensboro Review, Post Road, and many other publications. In 2011, she received the Howard Frank Mosher Prize from Hunger Mountain for “The Speed of Sound,” and in 2012 she received the Tusculum Review Prize for “Shakedown.” She works as a freelance writer and editor in Lancaster, PA, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Visit her at ecgonzalez.net.

In 2004, Gregg Wilhelm founded the nonprofit CityLit Project and acts as publisher of its CityLit Press imprint. A 2014 graduate of the University of Tampa’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, Gregg has since studied at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and DISQUIET: International Literary Program in Lisbon, and was part of the first U.S. Publishers Delegation to Cuba organized by Publishers Weekly. Gregg regularly teaches literature, fiction, and publishing courses in the Odyssey Program at the Johns Hopkins University. He is currently the Director of Marketing and Enrollment Development for MICA Open Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He lives in Highlandtown with his wife, Marik Moen, an assistant professor and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland Baltimore’s School of Nursing, and their two daughters. Visit him at www.GreggWilhelm.com

Samuel Ligon is the author of two novels—Among the Dead and Dreaming and Safe in Heaven Dead— and two collections of stories, Wonderland, illustrated by Stephen Knezovich, and Drift and Swerve. He edits the journal Willow Springs, teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, and is artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches fiction writing at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College.

February 22 Readings: Amber Sparks, Tracy Dimond, Melissa Gerr

Amber Sparks is the author of the just-released short story collection The Unfinished World and Other Stories, out from Liveright. She’s also the author of a previous short story collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, and co-author of a hybrid novel, the Desert Places, with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish. She blogs sporadically and posts stuff sometimes on her website, ambernoellesparks.com, and wastes time generally on Twitter @ambernoelle. She currently lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, infant daughter, and two cats, though she originally hails from the upper Midwest.

Tracy Dimond co-curates Ink Press Productions. Her latest chapbook, I Want Your Tan, was released in May by Ink Press. She is also the author of Grind My Bones Into Glitter, Then Swim Through The Shimmer (NAP 2014) and Sorry I Wrote So Many Sad Poems Today (Ink Press 2013), winner of Baltimore City Paper’s Best Chapbook. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Nervous Breakdown, Fact-Simile, Barrelhouse, Pinwheel, Sink Review, and other places. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore. She teaches composition and works in library event programming.

Melissa Gerr uses words, audio, and visuals to make stories. She is a senior reporter and managing editor at the Baltimore Jewish Times and her stories also appear in Style Magazine and the Baltimore City Paper. She’s written and produced for WYPR, PBS, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Annenberg Foundation, and a bunch of universities through the Laureate Education empire. She met Jen when she tried her hand at fiction and thought the instruction was fabulous, it’s still the telling-true-to-life stuff that she has the most fun at creating. She most recently published an article in the Baltimore City Paper called "Sugar Mountain: The Night Shift at Domino Sugar." She most recently published an article in the Baltimore City Paper called "Sugar Mountain: The Night Shift at Domino Sugar."

March 21th Readings: Max Weiss, Rafael Alvarez, Baynard Woods, and Abby Higgs

A native of New York, Max Weiss attended Bennington College, where she double majored in music and literature. After graduation, she moved to Baltimore, where she worked as a staff writer, columnist, and film critic for the Baltimore City Paper. She also wrote the award-winning “Nice Girl” humor column for the Baltimore City Paper. In 1992, Max began a longstanding relationship with Baltimore’s talk radio station, AM 1090 WBAL. For six years, she co-hosted a weekly movie review show with host Allan Prell until he left the station. For 15 years, as “Media Max,” she did a bi-weekly pop culture and film segment with WBAL’s “Dave Durian and the Morning Team.” In 1994, Max Weiss was hired by Baltimore Magazine as a staff writer. She now serves as the magazine’s managing editor. From 1998-2006, Max was the co-host of the nationally-syndicated weekly radio show, “Max and Mike on the Movies.” Since 2006, she has also been the weekend film critic for WBAL TV. A member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Women’s Film Critics Circle, Max is also a frequent television guest, emcee, and lecturer in the Baltimore region. She blogs at maxthegirl.com, baltimoremagazine.net/Maxspace, and vulture.com. She is also a serious amateur cellist.

Rafael Alvarez was born in Baltimore in 1958 and educated in local Catholic schools, graduating in 1981 from Loyola University of Maryland with a degree in English. He landed in the sports department of the Baltimore Sun as a teenager and learned to write on the City Desk, where he worked as a neighborhood reporter and rewrite man for the next 20 years. A former staff writer for the HBO drama, The Wire, Alvarez is the author of nine books, all concerned with a single subject: the City of Baltimore. His most recent collection of fiction - Crabtown, USA - was published by PMMP in 2015. His website is alvarezfiction.com.

Baynard Woods writes about Baltimore for The Guardian and is editor at large for the City Paper. He is the author of Coffin Point: The Strange Cases of Ed McTeer, Witchdoctor Sheriff, which is being produced as a television series, and is working on a book about people who believe in the Greek gods. His erstwhile column Conflicts of Interest was awarded Best Column by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. He writes libretti for Rhymes with Opera and sings in the rock 'n' roll band The Barnyard Sharks.

Abby Higgs is a graduate of the University of Baltimore's MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, Freerange Nonfiction, Catapult, Bustle, VICE, and The Barely South Review. She is the Assistant Editor of Queen Mob's Teahouse - an international online literary journal based in London. More of her words can be found at slowclapabby.com.

November 16th Readings: Lucas Southworth, Andrea Kleine, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Stephanie Barber

Lucas Southworth's stories are forthcoming from or have recently appeared in TriQuarterly, Meridian, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, and others. In 2012, his collection of short stories, Everyone Here Has a Gun, won AWP’s Grace Paley Prize and University of Massachusetts Press published the book in November 2013. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland and an editor for Slash Pine Press.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of The Inheritance of  Exile, which was a finalist in the AWP Book Awards Series and named ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year (Short Fiction). She is a former editor for Barrelhouse Magazine and co-founder of the annual Conversations & Connections Conference: Practical Advice on Getting Published. Her new book, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named winner of the AWP Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction and will be published in November 2015 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Her film and video work has been screened at MoMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The National Gallery, DC; The Paris Cinematheque and other museums and galleries. Her book these here separated to see how they standing alone was published in May 2008 by Publishing Genius Press. Her 2013 book Night Moves is available from Publishing Genius Press as well. Her book of very short stories ALL THE PEOPLE was published by Ink Press Productions in June 2015. Essays and poems can be found at Art21 Magazine, Hobart, Vlak, Aesthetics, Everyday Genius, Proof, H_ngm_n and other places.





Andrea Kleine is a writer and critically acclaimed performance artist. She is a five-time MacDowell Colony fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her critical writing has been published in PAJ: a journal of performance and art, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her blog ,The Dancers Will Win. Her debut novel, CALF, was described by Publishers Weekly as "unsettling, scary, and often brilliant" and was selected as one of their best fiction books of 2015.

October 26th Readings: Laura Bogart, Elisabeth Dahl, Christine Grillo, and Kathy Flann

Kathy Flann’s fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The North American Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, New Stories from the South, and other publications. A short story collection, Smoky Ordinary, won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award and was published by Snake Nation Press. A second collection entitled Get a Grip won the George Garrett Award and comes out with Texas Review Press in the fall of 2015. For five years, she taught creative writing at the University of Cumbria in England, where she created mini-courses for the BBC’s Get Writing website and served on the board of the National Association of Writers in Education. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Artsm the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, and Le Moulin a Nef in France. She is an associate professor at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Laura Bogart is a featured writer for Salon and a regular contributor to DAME magazine. Her work has appeared in IndieWire, SPIN, The Rumpus, and the Nervous Breakdown, among other publications. She has appeared on NPR affiliates and Al-Jazeera English. Laura has recently finished her first novel, titled Don't You Know That I Love You?

Elisabeth Dahl writes for both adults and children from her home in Baltimore. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Johns Hopkins Magazine, NPR.org, Post Road, the Little Patuxent Review, and other outlets. She's the author and illustrator of the middle-grade novel Genie Wishes, published by Abrams.

Christine Grillo is a science writer and editor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she focuses on food system stories. She also writes about health, parenting, people, and human rights, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Utne Reader, and local magazines like Baltimore Style. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, StoryQuarterly and other journals. She's a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in creative writing and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

September 21st readings: Melissa Wyse, Anthony Moll, Ashlie Kauffman, and Emily Mitchell

Anthony Moll is a poet, essayist, and military veteran. He writes about books for Baltimore Gay Life, and about queer life for Baltimore City Paper. He has taught writing at University of Baltimore and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the former. His forthcoming chapbook of poems,Go to the Ant, O Sluggard, is to be released this fall by akinoga press.

Ashlie Kauffman holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland. Her recognitions include an Individual Artist Award in Fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council as well as residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. She's had work published in Washington Square, Quarterly West, and The Light Ekphrastic, and is Senior Poetry Editor for the online journal jmww, for which she administers The Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Award, in honor of the late Claudia Emerson.

Melissa Wyse is a fiction writer from Baltimore. Her work has appeared in such publications as Shenandoah, Urbanite, and decomP. She has held Fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and received her Master of Fine Arts from American University. She is currently completing a collection of short stories set in World War II Hawaii, titled Moon Over Sand Island. Melissa is a 2014-15 recipient of a Ruby Grant from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.

Emily Mitchell’s first collection of short stories, Viral, was published in June 2015. The New York Times Book Review called this collection “[A]lluring…the best stories here push towards true heartbreak,” and, in a starred review, Kirkus Reviews described Viral as “[E]xceptionally readable…A rich collection that takes the familiar obsessions of love and loneliness and views them from uncanny angles in ways that are magical, cutting, and intensely recognizable.” She is also the author of a novel, The Last Summer of the World (W. W. Norton, 2007), which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, New England Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She teaches at the University of Maryland.

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.