Hazel Reading Series – March 2018

Celebrate Women’s History Month at Hazel Reading with our fantastic line-up of women writers. Don’t miss it!

Featuring
Dinika Amaral nominated by Sara Marinelli
Kirin Khan nominated by Kate Folk
Maya Kosover nominated by A’aron Heard
Olga Zilberbourg nominated by Tanya Rey
Simi Singh Juneja nominated by Zhayra Palma
Aurielle Lucier nominated by Lark Omura

Simi Singh Juneja was born in India and raised in the American South. She graduated from NYU in Paris with an MFA in Creative Writing. She is the keeper of stories in her family and the resident poet. Her debut short story, “How Doc Met Lady J,” was published by the Smithsonian Indian-American Heritage blog. She is currently co-authoring and translating a memoir with a Bollywood actress to be published by Penguin India. Additionally, her own novel set in Bombay is currently in the works. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and was Executive Producer on the feature film Miss India America. The film premiered in theaters in 2015, and went on to win best film at the Bentonville Film Festival and many others. It can now be seen on Netflix. She is a Voices of Our Nation alumna. She currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.

Dinika Amaral was born and raised in Bombay, India. A former banker with JP Morgan Chase, she has an M.A. and M.F.A. from New York University. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Times of India, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, Denver Quarterly, the Massachusetts Review, and in the Iowa Review (winner of the Tim McGinnis award). Presently, a Steinbeck Fellow, she is working on a gloriously unlinked short story collection and a novel about birds and Indian gangsters. She lives with her husband in the Silicon Valley, but her secret dream is to be a better mob wife to Michael Corleone than Kay.

Kirin Khan is a writer living in Oakland, CA who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico her hometown, and Peshawar, Pakistan her homeland. A 2016 VONA/Voices alum, 2017 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, and 2017 SF Writers Grotto Fellow, her work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Uproot, sPARKLE & bLINK, and 7×7.LA. Kirin is working on her first novel.

Olga Zilberbourg is a bilingual author who grew up in Russia and moved to the United States at the age of seventeen. Her English-language fiction has appeared in Confrontation, World Literature Today, Narrative, Outpost 19’s Golden State 2017 anthology, and others. She co-hosts the weekly San Francisco Writers Workshop.

Aurielle Marie is a Black, Atlanta-born, Queer hip-hop scholar and a cultural worker. Through her work as a poet and an activist, she explores the uses of intimacy and ritual in the practice of Black resistance. Aurielle is a Roddenberry Fellow Finalist, a Voices of Our Nation Fellow-Alum, and a current Queer Emerging Artist-In-Residence at Destiny Art Center. Both her activism and artistry ground themselves in the afro-indigenous legacy of storytelling in the Deep South. She was a 2016 Kopkind Fellow and has been featured as a social-political pundit on CNN. Her essays and poems have been published in Selfish Magazine, in Scalawag, on For Harriett, ESSENCE Mag, Allure, NBC Blk, and Huffington Post. Her inaugural collection, Gumbo Ya Ya, is forthcoming from Write Bloody Press. Her work has been featured on a global host of stages, most importantly in her grandmother’s kitchen.
Follow her on Twitter & Instagram: @ElleOfTwoCities.

Maya Kosover is a high school educator in Richmond, teaching English and Multimedia Journalism. When she’s not obsessing over students, she is learning in community, singing and dancing, playing with magic, crafting letters to pen pals, nesting as a homebody, and writing about what it means to be a queer, Jewish woman.

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