Reading Den

Join us on August 28, 2024 at Fort Greene for the next installment of the Reading Den series.

The event is free to the public and begins at 7pm. Registration is encouraged.

Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books) and the poetry collection  Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize.  Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press) as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program, and currently serves as a Program Curator at StoryStudio Chicago and a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.

Raksha Vasudevan is a journalist and essayist. Her work appears in the New York Times Magazine, VICE, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, and High Country News, where she is also a contributing editor. She is working on a reported memoir chronicling her half-decade as a south Asian aidworker in Africa, and reckoning with estrangement in all its forms. Early excerpts from this book have received support from the Canada Council of the Arts, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale, and the Canadian National Magazine Awards. 

Ashley Howell Bunn (she/they) completed her MFA in poetry through Regis University and holds a MA in Literature from Northwestern University. Their work has previously appeared in The Colorado Sun, South Broadway Ghost Society, Mulberry Literary, Tiny Spoon, Champagne Room Journal and others. Their first chapbook, in coming light, was published in 2022 by Middle Creek Publishing. She leads somatic writing workshops and has offered workshops through Sundress Publications, Sims Library of Poetry, and through her own business, Howell and Heal. She writes a monthly Yoga, Tarot, and Astrology column for Writual and works as a somatic coach. She is an adjunct instructor of English at the Community College of Denver, and she enjoys living close to the mountains with her family.

Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry and nonfiction. She’s the author of forthcoming memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home, the book-length poem Metabolics and the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other. She teaches at Portland Community College and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series at Tin House.

Brianna Wheeler is an author, host, and features writer in Portland, Oregon. She covers cannabis, culture, food, film, local politics, and is the podcast host for Portland’s Pulitzer Prize winning news weekly, Willamette Week. She is a frequent contributor to Portland City Cast, Weedmaps News, and Travel Portland. Her creative nonfiction work has appeared in The Nasiona, Midnight and Indigo, and has been featured in Medium’s Human Parts newsletter. In 2023 her first book, Eric Hoffer Award nominated memoir Altogether Different, was published by Korza Books.  Altogether Different is a hybrid work of historical non-fiction that braids Brianna’s late grandmother’s genealogical research into an illustrated, contemporary memoir.

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