Electric Literature and Debutiful are teaming up to throw another AWP Off-Site reading and party! Please join us on Friday, March 28, from 7-9:00 pm. The event will occur at Bar Henry (1228 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026) in Echo Park.
We are accepting donations to support the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. Please donate directly to the Food Bank at this link and email your receipt to awpdebut@gmail.com.
Reedsy has graciously offered to sponsor this event and will match up to $1,000 in donations!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Karissa Chen is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as residences at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts; the Ragdale Foundation; and Willapa Bay AiR. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan. Her debut novel Homeseeking is now available.
Kristen Arnett is the author of the novel With Teeth, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction, and the New York Times bestselling novel Mostly Dead Things, which was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Orlando, Florida.
Natalie Guerrero is a writer based in Los Angeles, California. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Electric Literature, Byline, Goop, and Blavity. Natalie’s long-form work includes “On Silence,” an essay published in Hungry Hearts (Dial Press), and Walking in My Joy (Amistad), an essay collection by actress Jenifer Lewis that Natalie co-authored. She has previously held positions at HarperCollins, WME Books, and Macro/M88. In her “free time,” she can be found walking her dog, Tupac, in the hills of Los Feliz. Her debut novel My Train Leaves at Three is available for pre-order.
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30. She is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.
Jon Hickey earned his MFA at Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. His short fiction has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast Online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian, and The Madison Review. Jon lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons. His debut novel Big Chief is available for pre-order.
Alexander Chee is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, and an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, T Magazine, Slate, Vulture, among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.
Denne Michele Norris is the editor in chief of Electric Literature, winner of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut novel When the Harvest Comes is available for pre-order.
Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers, One of the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award, and was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
AJ Romriell is a writer, photographer, and educator who has published work in Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Great River Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Sandy, Utah, he currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his partner and their feline companion, Sokka the Wildercat. His debut memoir Wolf Act is now available.
Danzy Senna is the bestselling author of six previous books, including Caucasia, New People, and most recently Colored Television. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.
This event is sponsored by Reedsy.