The Flash Fiction Collective returns to The Bindery for another big night of tiny tales! Featuring readings by Nancy Au, Kim Magowan, Peg Alford Pursell, and Olga Zilberbourg alongside FFC organizers Kirstin Chen, Jane Ciabattari, and Grant Faulkner. Join us!
Nancy Au is an Oakland-based writer and co-founder of The Escapery. She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches creative writing (to biology majors!) at California State University Stanislaus. Her writing appears in Redivider, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jellyfish Review, Lunch Ticket, Pithead Chapel, The Forge Literary Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the winner of Redivider’s 2018 Blurred Genres Contest, The Vestal Review’s 2018 VERA Flash Fiction Prize, and her flash fiction is included in the Best Small Fictions 2018 anthology. Her debut full-length collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, published by University of Cincinnati's Acre Books, just launched this September.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source was published by 7.13 Books in 2019. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, New World Writing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many other journals. Her story "Madlib" was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story "Surfaces" was selected for Wigleaf's Top 50 2019. She is the Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest and of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction 2017. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Joyland Magazine, Nothing Short of 100 (selected tales from 100 Word Story), and other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and founder and editor-in-chief of WTAW Press. She is a member of the Writers Grotto.
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press, 2019) and three Russian-language collections of stories. Her English-language work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Scoundrel Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a member of The Writers Grotto serves as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.
Kirstin Chen's novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, was named a best book of 2018 by Entropy, Popsugar and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper's Bazaar, and In Style. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and the National Arts Council of Singapore.
Jane Ciabattari is vice president/online and a former president of the National Book Critics Circle and a columnist for BBC Culture and The Literary Hub. A graduate of Stanford University., she received her MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is the author of Stealing the Fire (Dzanc Books 2013), a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and also has been honored with three Pushcart Prize special mentions, an editor's choice award from Hampton Shorts, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Dzanc Short Story Collection Award. Her flash fiction has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review and the anthologies Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story and A Book on the Table.
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He recently published a book of essays on creativity, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and he's also published Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in many literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer, and he's also co-host of the podcast Write-minded.
Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
This is an all ages event. The bar opens at 7pm; event starts at 7:30pm.
RSVP appreciated but not required.
Image: The Flash Fiction Collective at The Bindery in May 2018