Reading Den

Join us on May 27 at Fort Greene for the next installment of the Reading Den series.

The event is free and open to the public, and begins at 7pm. We are no longer requiring free registration for our events. Just show up and enjoy the readings and community.

Laura Venita Green is a writer and translator with an MFA from Columbia University, where she’ll begin teaching this fall. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, and Fatal Flaw. SISTER CREATURES, an Indie Next pick and one of Debutiful’s best debut books of 2025, is her first novel. Originally from Louisiana, she lives with her husband in New York City.

Shasta Grant grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Indianapolis. An Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest winner, and recipient of writing residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home and her stories and essays have appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, When We Were Feral, comes out on June 9th.

Roohi Choudhry was born in Pakistan, grew up in southern Africa and now calls Brooklyn, NY, home. Her debut novel, Outside Women (University Press of Kentucky, 2025), is a century-spanning story of feminist resistance, radical kinship, and migrant solidarity set in South Africa, Pakistan and New York City, and was described as “riveting… an incisive story of how change happens” by Publishers’ Weekly. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and residencies at Hedgebrook and Djerassi. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Adi Magazine, Longreads, Poets & Writers, and the Kenyon Review. 

Miranda Schmidt is the author of the novel Leafskin (Stillhouse Press) and the poetry chapbook The Cemetery Cure (forthcoming from dancing girl press). Their work circles the folkloric, the familial, queer magic, and the more-than-human world. Miranda’s writing has also appeared in Triquarterly, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, and more. With an MFA from the University of Washington and a PhD from Bath Spa University, she has taught creative writing at Portland Community College, the University of Washington, the Loft, Portland Literary Arts, and the Portland Book Festival. Their ongoing newsletter and teaching project, Writing Toward Nature, explores methods for bringing the more-than-human more deeply into our writing craft.

Kerry Donoghue is the author of MOUTH (Unsolicited Press, 2025), which Debutiful named as one of the best debut short story collections of 2025. Her poetry and stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Painted Bride Quarterly, Permafrost, The Louisville Review, and The South Carolina Review, among other journals. She earned an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and was a fiction cohort for the 2025 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out publicity incubator. She currently lives in the Bay Area.

Dane Bahr was born in Minnesota. He is the author of The Houseboat and Stag. He lives in Washington state with his wife and sons.