We are thrilled to announce our line up for our reading at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) in Boston to be held Friday, March 8 @ 3:00 pm. Room 110, Plaza Level, F229. We have an incredible line up in Margo Jefferson,  Keya Mitra, and Justin Torres–with our own Amy Benson leading the discussion about the origins of the series and why we find so much possibility in the first person plural.  Here is a little more information about our readers:

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson. She was a staff writer for Newsweek and The New York Times and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, Her essays have been widely published, and anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death Best African American Essays, 2010; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader; and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. She’s also written and performed a theater, “Sixty Minutes in Negroland.” She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Gonzaga University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA.  In 2008, she spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.  Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation, and her nonfiction has been published in Gulf Coast and American Literary Review.  Her story received special mention in the Pushcart Prize XXXVII Anthology, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes.  She has completed a short story collection, a novel, and a memoir.

Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller; he is now a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Amy Benson‘s prose has recently appeared in Triquarterly, BOMB Magazine, PANK, Boston Review, The New England Review, Seneca Review, Black Warrior Review, diagram, and Hotel Amerika, among other journals. Her book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, was chosen by Ted Conover as the 2003 winner of the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.