On Friday, February 27, Paragraph members Lee Matthew Goldberg, Maya Macdonald, Maria McFarland, and Natalie Shure shared their work, along with another addition of Write Your Way Into My Heart, a Paragraph-inspired five-minute soap opera by Kirsten Major.
Matthew Lee Goldberg
Maria MacFarland
Natalie Shure
Group shot with host Ryan Davenport & photographer Kirsten Major
Lee Matthew Goldberg graduated with an MFA from the New School. He is a regular contributor to The Montreal Review and The Adirondack Review. His fiction has also appeared in Essays & Fictions, The New Plains Review, Orion Headless, Verdad Magazine,BlazeVOX, and on Amazon. He has co-founded a monthly reading series called The Guerrilla Lit Fiction Series. His debut novel Slow Downis a neo-noir thriller that was published by New Pulp Press in January. Follow him at leematthewgoldberg.com.
Maya Macdonald is a playwright and sometimes performer. She is bad at sleeping, but skilled at dreaming. Her plays tend to be a collision between many mediums. Her work has been read, workshopped and produced with The Bushwick Starr, New Dramatists, Ensemble Studio Theatre, MCC Young Playwrights, Surf Reality and very likely; your livingroom. Her play Leave the Balcony Open was produced at 3-Legged Dog and DePaul University. Maya attempts optimism daily, and believes that hope is cutting edge.www.mayamacdonald.net.
Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno is a long-time human rights activist and expert on Latin America and US foreign policy. From 2004 to 2010 she covered Colombia’s vicious internal war for a leading human rights organization, and published multiple in-depth investigative reports about the conflict. In later years, she has worked on a broad array of US foreign policy and domestic human rights matters, including the “war on drugs” and global surveillance. Her opinion pieces have appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, ForeignPolicy.com, The Global Post and The Miami Herald. Maria is working on a book that tells the true story of three little-known Colombians who, over the last two decades, stood up to the cocaine-running paramilitary groups that were decimating their country and exposed their influence at the highest levels of government. A Peruvian-American who lived in Peru until 1997, Maria is now based in Brooklyn.
Natalie Shure is a writer, journalist and comedian in Brooklyn and is currently the World Editor at Blouin News, where she writes about foreign policy. She has an MA in Journalism and Russian Area Studies from NYU, where she wrote her thesis on the drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic in the former Soviet Union. Her work has been featured inThe Atlantic, Slate, BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Onion, Cosmopolitan, Alternet, The New York Observer and elsewhere.
Write Your Way Into My Heart: A Paragraph-inspired Five-Minute Soap Opera: A dramatic reading of Episode Two, which follows Leo and Violet, two singleton members of Wordz, a New York City writing space, as they look for love. Story by Kirsten Major.