Thursday, June 10th at 8PM, Brooklyn Reading Works presents “People Make Mistakes” an evening of fiction curated by Martha Southgate. Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family, Danielle Evans, author of the upcoming short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and Martha Southgate, author of Third Girl From the Left will read.
Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left, which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was shortlisted for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy award. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She now teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA program.
Lauren Grodstein’s books include the novels A Friend of the Family and Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, and The Best of Animals, a story collection. Her pseudonymous Girls Dinner Club was a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, French, Turkish, and other languages, and her essays and stories have been widely anthologized.
Lauren teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Camden, where she helps administer the college’s MFA program. She lives with her husband and son in New Jersey.
Danielle Evans was born in Northern Virginia in 1983. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2008, The Paris Review, Phoebe, Black Renaissance Noire, and The L Magazine. She received a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University, an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Carol Houck Smith Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has taught in the creative writing program at Missouri State University, and has recently joined the faculty at American University in Washington, DC. She is currently editing her first short story collection, tentatively titled Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and working on a novel titled The Empire Has No Clothes. Both are forthcoming from Riverhead Books.
Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House on June 10 at 8PM. $5 suggested donation includes refreshments. Books will be offered for sale.