Brooklyn Reading Works this Thursday at 8 p.m. Three Writers, Three Interesting Stories. The Old Stone House Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets.

CARLA THOMPSON,  an award-winning freelance writer and filmmaker, invites readers to travel the clay and paved roads of Montgomery, Alabama in her first book, a memoir, Bearing Witness: Not So Crazy in Alabama.

In Bearing Witness: Not So Crazy in Alabama, the Harlem native meets an itty bitty beauty queen, a redemptive ex-con, and a wheelchair-bound quiz kid among others and discovers that the American South is a complex intersection of race and class filled with people who go about the business of living the best way they can.

BRANKA RUZAK was born and raised in the steel and rubber belt of northeastern Ohio, the youngest daughter of Croatian and Slovenian immigrants. Her passion for words and music was sparked as a child, where she spent many hours listening to her father’s stories and playing Croatian folk music in his tamburitza orchestra. Her current studies in Hindusthani classical music, as well as her enthusiasm for Indian novels, textiles and a good cup of chai have taken Branka further afield to India. Always an avid traveler, her essays and poems are journeys to different times and different places. Her essays “Hungry Heart” and “Mothballs: A Chemical Memory” is from a growing collection of writings about family, culture and travel..

MRS. CLEAVAGE,  author of the blog MRS CLEAVAGE’S DIARIES, is a single mother who lives in  a cluttered apartment in East New York. She is saucy, opinionated, creative, and a smarty-pants – not necessarily in that order. Her blog is her story, live and unedited from Brooklyn.