SUSAN TAYLOR CHEHAK
STEVE ABEE
DIANE J. WRIGHT
MEEHAN RASCH
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Doors open at 7:00 - Reading begins at 7:30pm
The Good Luck Bar, 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles, 90027 (east Hollywood/Silver Lake: corner of Hollywood & Hillhurst)
21 and over only.
RSVP at rhapsodomancyla at gmail dot com (RSVP not required, but appreciated)
$3 suggested donation at door. Proceeds will benefit The Bridge Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.
There will be a cash bar.
http://www.rhapsodomancy.org
Susan Taylor Chehak is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and the author of five novels, including Smithereens (a Hammett Award nominee), The Truth About Annie D. (an Edgar Award nominee and New York Times Notable Book), and Harmony (a Literary Guild Editor's Choice), as well as a book of nonfiction, Don Quixote Meets the Mob: The Craft of Fiction and the Art of Life. Her short stories have appeared in Guernica Magazine, L.A. Under The Influence, Sisters in Crime 5, and The Chariton Review. She is Executive Editor of ZinkZine, an online literary journal at www.ZinkZine.com, and teaches fiction writing in the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, as well as in The UCLA Extension Writers' Program and the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. Susan grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spends as much time as possible in Colorado, and at present divides her time between Los Angeles and Toronto.
Steve Abee was born in Santa Monica, California and began writing after high school when he held a job as an orderly at St. John’s Hospital, the same hospital he was born in. His mind started to unfold itself as he witnessed the unfolding and closing of human life and he thought if he was going to save it, his mind, he better start writing things down. “I saw the fragility and blessedness of lives and started to come apart in the wonderment of it all.” His work seeks the ecstatic universal in the common grains of the day. Beck Hansen has called Abee "The Love Powered Bull Horn blasting down from the altitudes," and Lydia Lunch has remarked that his "... savage poetry demands the reader devour passage after passage, only to be left soul seared and simultaneously re-invigorated." He is the author of the new poetry collection, Great Balls of Flowers out now with Write Bloody books, and the upcoming novel Johnny Future with MacAdam/Cage; also he authored the Los Angeles underground classic The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit (Phony Lid Books), and the collection of short stories and poems King Planet (Incommunicado). He lives and teaches in Los Angeles.
Diane J. Wright is a novelist, screenwriter, and partner in MilkBoss Industries with filmmaker Jeff Renfroe. She is the founder and editor of
THE STORY SPOT, a story consultation website and service for writers by writers and, with novelist Kathryn Pope, is co-founder of
Seedpod Publishing, a home for literary fiction and memoir in a digital age. Diane has collaborated on screenplays with studios, independent production companies, and filmmakers in LA and Toronto. She has been a judge in the Carl Sutter Screenwriting Competition and contributed to feature films that earned competition spots in the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals. She has been the honored recipient of the Eloise Klein Healy Award for new writers and twice received Telefilm Canada's Writer's First Award.Diane earned her master’s degree from the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles and lives and writes in British Columbia, Canada and Southern California where the fictional world of
Birthday Girl is set.
Meehan Ras
ch is a writer, academic, and attorney originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. A long-time Angeleno, her writing and music are a Watts Tower of shards from the collisions of desire and loss, ecstasy and absurdity. Meehan is a grateful alum of Writers at Work in Silver Lake, the Naropa Summer Writing Program, the Beyond Baroque fiction workshop in Venice, and the songwriting workshops of Nicola Gordon in Santa Barbara. In 2008-09, she was active in the Live to Dream and Santa Barbara Open Mic nights sponsored by Free Culture Arts Foundation and the Santa Barbara Independent, and one of her favorite creative endeavors was hosting and curating the FROG Salon series of art, music, and literature house parties in 2007-08. Meehan's poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals including Masque, Westwind, and Twittering Machine, and she received the Best Poem award from genesis literary magazine at Indiana University-Indianapolis. Law pays the bills, though; Meehan is currently a Sidley Austin Pro Bono Fellow at the Public Counsel Appellate Law Program in Los Angeles. Her legal scholarship has been published in a variety of law reviews.