Join us via Zoom on Sunday, September 12, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Allen Gee, Robert Jones, Jr., Kevin McIlvoy, Peter Markus and Vanessa K. Valdés, hosted and curated by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Each writer is extraordinary and I am thrilled that they will join us for this reading. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. RSVP here.

More about the writers:

Allen Gee is the author of the essay collection, My Chinese America.  He recently completed a novel, The Laborers, and is currently at work on At Little Monticello: the James Alan McPherson biography, (UGA Press).  He’s been the Editor at Gulf Coast, Fiction Editor at Arts & Letters, and Editor of the multicultural imprint 2040 Books.  His essay Old School won a Pushcart, and his work appears in numerous journals, as well as the anthology, Dear America.  He is currently the D.L. Jordan Distinguished Chair of Creative Writing at Columbus State University where he also serves as the Director/Editor of CSU Press.

New York Times-bestselling author Robert Jones, Jr., was born and raised in New York City. He received his BFA in creative writing with honors and MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Paris Review, Essence, OkayAfrica, The Feminist Wire, and The Grio. He is the creator of the social-justice social media community Son of Baldwin. The Prophets is his debut novel. Photo Credit: Alberto Vargas RainRiver Images.

Peter Markus is the author of several books of fiction, among them the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, and the collections of shorter fiction The Fish and the Not Fish, We Make Mud, and Good, Brother. He is also the author of Inside My Pencil, a work of non-fiction about the work he’s been doing for over two decades as a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. A new book of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, is forthcoming in September of 2021. 

Kevin McIlvoy’s novel One Kind Favor (WTAW Press, May 2021) is his eighth published book. He has published five novels, A Waltz (Lynx House Press), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; paperback, Collier/Macmillan), Little Peg (Atheneum/Macmillan; paperback, Harper Perennial), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books; paperback, Avon), At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press); and a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. His short-short stories and prose poems have appeared in The Scoundrel, The Collagist, Pif, Kenyon Review Online, The Cortland Review, Prime Number, r.k.v.r.y, Waxwing, and various online literary magazines. A collection of his prose poems and short-short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, has been published by Four Way Books (October 2017). For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019; he taught as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008. He has lived in Asheville, North Carolina since 2008.

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her latest book, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) is an edited collection that re-centers Haiti in the disciplines of Caribbean, and more broadly, Latin American Studies.