We are thrilled to present the line up for the First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series on Tuesday, April 12th: writers Rosebud Ben-Oni, Amy Fusselman, and Chinelo Okparanta! Join us for this fabulous season finale at 7pm at Shrine, located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell (7th Ave) between 133rd and 134th in Harlem. By subway: 2/3 to 135th, or B/C to 135th. As always, admission is free. Bar is cash only.
Born to a Mexican mother and a Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a graduate of the Women’s Work Lab at New Perspectives Theater in NYC. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review.
Amy Fusselman is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is the author of the nonfiction books The Pharmacist’s Mate, 8, and, most recently, Savage Park. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The Hairpin, and Word Riot. She writes a semi-regular column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency entitled, “Family Practice: An Occasional Column by ‘Dr.’ Amy Fusselman.” She was the writer/editor/illustrator of the international ‘zine, Bunnyrabbit, and the editor/contributor of the literary website, Surgery of Modern Warfare.
Chinelo Okparanta is the author of the novel, Under the Udala Trees, which has been widely praised in publications such as Essence, The Guardian, Lambda Literary, The New York TImes, and Vogue. Her short story collection, Happiness Like Water, was cited as an editors’ choice in the New York Times Book Review and listed among The Guardian’s Best African Fiction of 2013. She is the winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an O. Henry Prize. Okparanta was also a finalist for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing, the 2013 Society of Midland Authors Award, and the 2014 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in Literature. She has been awarded residencies by the Jentel Foundation, the Hermitage Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, as well as Hedgebrook. Beginning in the fall of 2016, she will serve as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing (Fiction) at Bucknell University where she has also been named Grange and Rogers Faculty Research Fellow.
Join us 7pm Tuesday night, April 12th, at Shrine for our last reading of the season!