Join us for the FPP Season finale with writers Jennifer Baker, Cynthia Manick, Dennis Norris II, and Sarah Perry. We start at 6pm on Monday, April 30th at Silvana in Harlem at 300 W. 116th Street, SW corner of Frederick Douglass/8th Ave. Take the B/C to 116th and you’re there! Admission is free. Cake will be served!
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, and contributing editor to Electric Literature. She has done social media for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books (where she was also a panel organizer), and presently for the I, Too Arts Collective. She has lead writing courses in fiction and nonfiction for Sackett Street, I, Too Arts, and independently. In 2017, she was awarded a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship & Queens Council on the Arts New Work Grant (as well as their award for Artistic Excellence) for Nonfiction Literature. Jennifer is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life with Atria Books publishing in August. Her writing has appeared in Newtown Literary (for which her short story “The Pursuit of Happiness” was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize), Boston Literary Magazine, Eclectic Flash, The Offing, Poets & Writers, The Other Stories podcast, Kweli Journal, and The Female Complaint anthology from Shade Mountain Press. She has also contributed to Forbes.com, LitHub, The Billfold, School Library Journal, and Bustle among other online publications. Her website is jennifernbaker.com.
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A poet and storyteller with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Poets House, and the MacDowell Colony among others. She is East Coast Editor of Jamii Publishing and founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. A winner of the 2016 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry and a 2017 Barbara Memorial Fund Award for Poetry, her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Series, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, The Los Angeles Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
photo by Melissa Czarnik
Dennis Norris II is a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a 2016 Tin House Scholar, and a 2015 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. They are the author of Awst Collection—Dennis Norris II published by Awst Press, and other writing appears in Apogee Journal and SmokeLong Quarterly. Their story, “Where Every Boy is Known and Loved” was recently named as a Finalist for the 2018 Best Small Fictions Anthology, forthcoming from Braddock Avenue Books, and their story “Last Rites” appears in the collection Everyday People: The Color of Life, forthcoming in August 2018 from the Atria Books imprint of Simon and Schuster. They currently serve as Fiction Editor at Apogee Journal, Assistant Fiction Editor at The Rumpus, and co-host of the popular podcast Food 4 Thot. You can find more information at their website: www.dennisnorrisii.com.
Sarah Perry holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University and a B.A. from Davidson College, where she will serve as the 2019 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has attended residencies at Norton Island in Maine and PLAYA in Oregon. Perry’s prose has appeared in Blood & Thunder magazine, Bluestockings Literary Journal, Elle.com, and The Guardian. She lives in Brooklyn.