Reading Den

Join us on September 30 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.

Ramona Ausubel is the author of five books, most recently The Last Animal which was a national bestseller, received the National Book Foundation Science + Nature Prize and was a Barnes & Noble book of the month. Her previous books are Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and has taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars, Tin House Writing Workshop, Writing by Writers, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Environmental, Writing Workshop Paris and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She is the author of the novel How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder (Pantheon) and the short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians (Viking) which was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine,Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, andThe Asian American Literary Review among others. 

Kaitlin Lavinder is a literary fiction author based in Colorado. She is the author of the upcoming debut novella The Chrysanthemums, which was long-listed for the Santa Fe Writers Project 2025 Literary Awards. She has published in Hypertext Magazine, BlazeVOX, and Jabber Literary. She has held fiction writing residencies at Ragdale, Washington Island Writers’ Retreat, and The Himalayan Writing Retreat. She holds an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Journalism from Temple University, and she was previously a foreign affairs journalist in Washington, DC. She enjoys coniferous forests, western grisette mushrooms, the moon, and cats.

Amanda McCracken is a journalist passionate about experiences that highlight the intersection of wellness, travel, and relationships. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Vogue, National Geographic, Elle, NPR, Outside, ESPN, SELF, Runner’s World, and many others. She published her first article about longing in 2013, which led to additional articles featuring personal anecdotes and deep research and interviews with the BBC and Katie Couric. She is now considered a limerence expert and intimacy advocate. Her 2023 TED Talk, “How Longing Keeps Us From Healthy Relationships,” highlights how longing can become self-sabotaging and shares how to change our patterns of longing. McCracken is also a part-time university instructor, massage therapist, triathlon coach, and competitive athlete. Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, McCracken currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and daughter.

April Dawn’s all-consuming love for reading and writing began in early childhood. In the third grade, she received the Young Authors Award for her story about a leprechaun who ended up at McDonald’s. She continued to write short stories and poetry and began blogging for small businesses in 2014. Her first poetry collection, “Lungs Like Elephants,” was published in 2020 and received the Langston Hughes Award from Missouri Southern State University in 2021. April blended her love of music and writing while working as a music journalist with 303 magazine from 2022-2024.