Join Electric Literature and Paragraph for a night of fiction, poetry and nonfiction readings by some of today's most exciting women writers: Akil Kumarasamy, Michelle Hart, YZ Chin, Leah Johnson, and Terese Svoboda. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Electric Lit's #ReadMoreWomen campaign, we'll be giving away EL prizes and free time at Paragraph!
Reading starts promptly at 7:00 PM.
Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of Michigan, the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Schomburg Center. She is a visiting professor in fiction at the Helen Zell Writers' Program. Half Gods is her first book.
A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda has published 18 books of poetry, memoir, biography, a book of translation from the Nuer, and fiction, most recently Great American Desert, a book of stories about climate from prehistoric times to the future. In a starred review, Kirkus praised “[Svoboda's] enigmatic sentences, elliptical narratives, and percussive plots” of “her all-too-real creations” in Great American Desert.
YZ Chin's debut book of fiction Though I Get Home is a Louise Meriwether First Book Prize winner, and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature honor title. Her writing has been published by Electric Literature, Harvard Review, and Paper Darts, among others. Born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia, she now lives in New York. She also works as a software engineer.
Michelle Hart is the Assistant Books Editor of O, the Oprah Magazine. Other writing of hers has appeared on The Millions, The Rumpus, and The New Yorker. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland and Electric Literature. She has been awarded a fiction fellowship by the New York State Writers Institute and was once profiled in her hometown newspaper for being in the process of writing a novel—a novel she is still in the process of writing.
Leah Johnson is a writer, educator and hopeless Midwesterner currently moonlighting as a New Yorker. She's the Social Media Editor at Electric Litand a Contributing Editor at Catapult. Leah received her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2018 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work—which can be found at Bustle, Electric Lit, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Establishment and elsewhere—is centered on the miracle and magic of black womanhood.