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Tuesday, July 26, 7 PM
PEN USA Emerging Voices Reading Emerging Voices is designed to serve up-and-coming writers from communities traditionally under-represented in the publishing world. Each Emerging Voices Rosenthal fellow is paired with a mentor—an established author—with the aim of offering both meaningful critique and professional guidance. The program also includes classes through the Writer’s Program at UCLA Extension, PEN USA’s own workshops and master classes, and the opportunity to meet successful authors, agents, and publishers. Admittance to the program is highly competitive, with 6-8 Fellows selected from over 100 applicants. The program has proven enormously successful, as EV Alum publish at a rate equal to or surpassing graduates of the most prestigious MFA programs. www.penusa.org Cynthia Bond is a writer and educator. After years of teaching creative writing to homeless youth, she is focusing her energy on completing her novel Ruby, which explores the effects of tyranny and racism in Liberty, an all-black East Texas town. Through Ruby’s eyes we journey into madness as she haunts the red roads and piney woods. Jawanza Dumisani is Director of the Anansi Poetry Workshop at the World Stage. His first chapbook, Stoetry, was an editor’s choice on FoxStarFire Press, and Beyond Baroque selected him as an emerging voice in the 2003 LA Poetry Festival. A Detroit native, Dumisani is working on his first novel, Nails, Flowers, Blood, and Stone, a tale of Motown in the 1960s. Robbie Frandsen is a community re-entry specialist for ex-prison inmates, and also teaches reading and writing to adults. She is at work on Loving Thin These Walls, the unfolding story of her experience as the mother of a young man with no criminal record charged with two counts of first-degree murder, still incarcerated in Los Angeles awaiting trial. Qevin Oji is a graduate of Howard University in Washington D.C., where he founded and published the Anacostia Grapevine newspaper, and directed The Gallery of Good Hope and the Open City arts initiative. As playwriting fellow with Wordsmyths, he wrote the recently produced Roach Killers. Oji won the Jerry Jazz Short Fiction Contest for Anacostia. He currently teaches Literature and Composition at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles and is working on his novel, Moving Days, an Angel City coming-of-age tale. Lan Tran is working on Lone Stars, a tragic-comic nonfiction collection drawn from her Vietnamese-Texan upbringing in the ‘70s. Weaving childhood memories with stories from her family’s past, she explores one family’s transgression of borders, both personal and geographic, in crafting a modern American tale. Alia Yunis is a screenwriter and freelancer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times. She received a Warner Bros. Comedy Writing award. She is completing The Key to My House, a novel about an 85-year old Arab-American woman who gets nightly visits from Scheherazade and who knows that by the 1001st visit, she will die. Before then, she must decide who will inherit her parents’ home in Lebanon, a house she herself has not seen in more than 60 years. |
