Story is the Thing

The fifth installment of the Story Is the Thing Quarterly Reading Series is only a month away! Join us on November 16th at 7:30 PM for an evening of storytelling with seven local literary stars, reading on the theme “The Unsent Letter.” We’ll start with light refreshments at 7:00 PM.

Readers this time will be David Denny, Joyce Kiefer, Michael David Lukas, Chiseche Salome Mibenge, Marian Palaia, Austin Smith, and Rebecca Winterer.

David Denny’s fiction has recently appeared in Narrative, Catamaran, and New Ohio Review. His short story collection, The Gill Man in Purgatory, is now available from Shanti Arts. He is also the author of three poetry collections: Man Overboard, Fool in the Attic, and Plebeian on the Front Porch. More information at daviddenny.net.

Joyce Kiefer is a lifelong Bay Area resident.  She majored in English and Journalism at San Jose State. She has had poetry published in several award winning collections including Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood, and Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word. Joyce has also had feature pieces published in the San Jose Mercury News and was a regular contributor to The Columnists. She contributes travel pieces to Bay Area Family Travel and has had memoir pieces appeared in By the Bay and Cooking Up Stories.” Joyce enjoys writing memoir, travel experience, and wry commentary on the small things in life that turn out to be bigger than we think. Read her blog: http://lifeinthepursuit.blogspot.com.

Michael David Lukas is the author of the international bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, which was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and has been published in fifteen languages. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, is forthcoming from Spiegel & Grau in March 2018. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv. A graduate of Brown University, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and VQR. He lives in Oakland, California.

Michael David Lukas is the author of the international bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, which was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and has been published in fifteen languages. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, is forthcoming from Spiegel & Grau in March 2018. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv. A graduate of Brown University, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and VQR. He lives in Oakland, California.

Chiseche Salome Mibenge is the author of Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender From The War Narrative (UPenn Press, 2013). She studied Law in Zambia, her country of birth and received her PhD in International Human Rights Law from Utrecht University in 2010. She is a human rights educator, writer, and editor and blogs at chisechemibenge.com. Chiseche is an awardee of the Columbia Journal of Literature and Art winter 2017 contest for her short story, The Protected Party.

Marian Palaia’s first novel, The Given World, (Simon and Schuster, 2015) was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, longlisted for The PEN/Bingham First Novel Prize, a finalist for the VCU/Cabell Award, and recognized by Kirkus as a Best Novel of 2015. She lives in San Francisco, California and in Missoula, Montana with her Mongolian Barking Shepherd, Tupelo.

Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. His poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Poetry Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Threepenny Review, ZYZZYVA, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares and New England Review, amongst others. His first collection of poems, Almanac, was chosen for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published in 2013. A second collection, Flyover Country, will be published by Princeton in the fall of 2018. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction, Smith teaches poetry, fiction, documentary journalism and environmental literature classes at Stanford University.

Rebecca Winterer is the author of The Singing Ship, awarded the Del Sol Press 2016 First Novel Prize and selected as a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2016 Big Moose Prize. Shes received fellowships at the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Yaddo; and has had a story published by Puerto del Sol.  She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Raised in Queensland, Australia, she now lives in San Francisco, California with her husband.