This is a first for Dock Street, and as far as we know, there are no public events like it in West Philly - a prose reading showcasing local authors and hosted by Philadelphia-based writers Matt Jakubowski and Christine Kendall.
Ru Freeman, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and Marc Anthony Richardson will be reading from their work.
Bindlestiff Books will on on hand with books by Ru Freeman and Marc Anthony Richardson - if you like what you hear, you can support the writers, and gussy up your bookshelves, by snagging some of their works.
Doors open at 5pm for drinks + snacks, and the readings start at 7pm. Come early to secure a seat!
RU FREEMAN
Ru Freeman is the author of the novels A Disobedient Girl (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf, 2013), a New York Times Editor's Choice Book. Both novels have been translated into several languages including Italian, French, Hebrew, Dutch, and Chinese. She is the editor of the ground-breaking anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015). Her writing appears internationally including in the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. She blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics, is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and is the recipient of many fellowships including from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the 2014 winner of the Sister Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG
Emma Copley Eisenberg is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in West Philadelphia. She is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl, forthcoming from Hachette Books, and her work has appeared in places like Granta, American Short Fiction, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ZZVZZYA, No Tokens, The New Republic, Salon, Slate, VICE and others.
MARC ANTHONY RICHARDSON
Marc Anthony Richardson received his MFA from Mills College. He is an artist and writer from Philadelphia. Year of the Rat, his debut novel, was the winner of the 2015 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. In 2017, it was awarded an American Book Award; the ceremony was televised on C-SPAN from the San Francisco Jazz Center. He was also the recipient of fellowships from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, was waitlisted for the Macdowell Colony, and was a finalist for the Headlands Center for the Arts. Currently, he is writing a work of speculative fiction that takes place in an alternative America, one where you can take on the capital punishment of a relative, a derivative of the Native American blood law.