We can’t wait for our next reading at Shrine on November 19th, which will feature novelist and political commentator Ru Freeman, poet Randall Horton, fiction writer Karen Russell, and documentary filmmaker Pam Sporn.  The readings will begin at 7pm, while Zubetei will begin at 6:30 with a DJ set and close the night with a second set.  Shrine is located at 2271 Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd in Harlem, New York.  We hope to see you there!

Ru Freeman was born into a family of writers and many boys in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her political writing appears in English, Sinhala, and Farsi. She is the author of A Disobedient Girl (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf Press, 2013), both of which have been translated into multiple languages including Hebrew, Italian, French, and Chinese, and both of which were long-listed for the DCS Prize for South Asian Literature. She is a contributing editorial board member of The Asian American Literary Review, and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has worked in the field of American and international humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights, and writes for the Huffington Post on literature and politics. She is a national speaker who teaches at Columbia University and lives in Philadelphia.

Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award and most recently a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Randall is a Cave Canem Fellow, a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a member of The Symphony: The House that Etheridge Built. Randall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven. An excerpt from his memoir titled Roxbury is published by Kattywompus Press. Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press in the publisher of his latest poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy. He currently lives in NYC.

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, is the author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006), for which she was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35”; Swamplandia (2011), for which she was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, and Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories (2013).  She is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and has been featured in both The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and New York Magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program and is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award; her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The New Yorker.

Pam Sporn is a Bronx-based documentary filmmaker whose work interweaves historical narratives and personal storytelling. Pam is currently editing Detroit 48202: Conversations Along a Postal Route, a look at the changes in Detroit over the last 30 years through the eyes of a mailman. Her earlier films have screened at many venues and festivals including the Anthology Film Archives, The Havana Film Festival, The Chicago International Latino Film Festival, The London International Documentary Film Festival, and at colleges and community media centers nation-wide. Her work includes Con El Toque De La Chaveta/With a Stroke of the Chaveta, which traces the tradition of “el lector” reading to cigar makers while they work; Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories, a look at immigration, racial identity, and US-Cuban relations through the lens of one Afro- Cuban-American family; Recordando EL Mamoncillo/Remembering the Mamoncillo Tree, a joyous documentary short about the annual dance held by El Club Cubano Inter-Americano in New York City for the last three decades; and Disobeying Orders: GI Resistance to the Vietnam War. She is also in development on her documentary A Humble Giant: 70 Years Defending Immigrants and Radicals, about legendary immigration lawyer Ira Gollobin.