An afternoon reading of four writers experimenting in various unique ways with prose and story.

Readers:
  Karen Lillis
  Margarita Meklina
  Lauren Traetto
  Olga Zilberbourg

Karen Lillis writes fiction, poetry, and genres inbetween. She is the author of four short novels, most recently Watch the Doors as They Close (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012). Her writing has appeared in Evergreen Review, Everyday Genius, Free State Review, New York Nights, Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, Sensitive Skin Magazine, Trip City, and many more. 2014 publications include a poetry chapbook, The Paul Simon Project (Night Ballet Press) and a selection in Wreckage of Reason Two: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Women Writers (Spuyten Duyvil). Currently based in Pittsburgh, she blogs at Karen the Small Press Librarian and runs Small Press Roulette, an indie press bookselling service. Lillis recently received an Acker Award for Avant Garde Excellence in Fiction.

Margarita Meklina is a bilingual writer (English and Russian) who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, but now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her articles and short stories originally written in English have appeared in The Contemporary Pacific, The Context (Dalkey Archive), The Cumberland River Review, Fiction Fix, Gather Kindling, Words Without Borders, the anthology Wreckage of Reason Two (Spuyten Duyvil), and many other publications. Her works translated by others from Russian to English were featured in The Mad Hatters’ Review, The Toad Suck Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and The Russian Life. Meklina is a winner of both the 2003 Andrei Bely Prize, Russia’s first independent literary prize, which enjoys a special reputation for honoring dissident and nonconformist writing, and the 2009 Russian Prize, which was awarded by the Yeltsin Center Foundation for her manuscript My Criminal Connection to Art. In addition to authoring five collections of short stories published in Moscow and one epistolary novel written in collaboration with the poet Arkady Dragomoschenko, she has published interviews with Alessandro Baricco, Diana di Prima, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ulay, and David Sedaris, among others.

Lauren Traetto is the SF Vicereine of Vouched Books, contributing editor for FANZINE, and managing editor of Coconut Books. She is co-host and co-producer of the monthly show Scene Missing, and a chapbook of her work is forthcoming from 421 Atlanta.

Olga Zilberbourg was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and moved to the United States at the age of seventeen. Her first two books of fiction were published in St. Petersburg, where her parents still reside. Where Does the Sea Flow, a short film based on one of Olga’s stories, was short-listed at the Manhattan Short Film Festival. Olga’s English-language writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Santa Monica Review, Eleven Eleven Journal, Café Irreal, Mad Hatters’ Review, Prick of the Spindle, HTMLGiant, and other print and online publications. Olga serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine.