Please mark your calendars now for an upcoming benefit and book release party to celebrate the Summer 2007 International Issue of Washington Square.
Here are the bios for the writers reading at the benefit:
Aracelis Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow whose work has been published in Gathering Ground, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Bellevue Literary Review, & Callaloo, among other journals. Her book of poems, Teeth, is forthcoming from Curbstone Press in June, 2007.
Christopher Harris is a freelance writer living in Amherst, MA, who earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts. He recently published short stories in News From the Republic of Letters and LIT and is working on a novel, from whence his story, The Rembrandts, hails.
Cate Marvin's second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, will be published by Sarabande Books in August 2007. She teaches at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Robin Messing has published fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. A novel is forthcoming in 2008. She coaches teachers in the teaching of writing and reading for the New York City Department of Education.
Jayne Anne Phillips is a graduate of West Virginia University and the University of Iowas Writers Workshop. Professor Phillips has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, Boston University, and Brandeis University. The author of the novels Machine Dreams, Shelter, and MotherKind, as well as the story collections Black Tickets and Fast Lanes, her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has appeared most recently in Haper's, Granta, Doubletake and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Professor Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, and a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.
Robin Beth Schaer is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly and Barrow Street, among other journals. She works at the Academy of American Poets and lives in New York City.
Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng and of the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy. He is also a screenwriter who has collaborated with Julie Taymor, Disney films, and (for the upcoming movie version of Chang and Eng) Gary Oldman. His fiction has been widely anthologized, translated into thirteen languages, and published in seventeen countries. His third novel (as well as a book of stories and essays) will be published by Dutton in 2006.
Marina Temkina is a poet writing in Russian and in English and an author of four books of poetry. Her last book of poetry CANTO IMMIGRANTO was published by New Literary review in Moscow, 2005. Her new book will be published by Ugly Duckling Press in 2008. She has exhibited concrete poetry installations and made a public poetry project for the Second Street Station, Hudson-Bergen Light Rail in Hoboken. She received a grant from National Endowment for the Arts in 1994, and a Charles Revson Fellowship from Columbia University in 2000. She is a graduate of New York University.