Dogfish presents John Pope and Jon Padgett

Dogfish Reading Series hosts John Pope and Jon Padgett at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 19, at 2448 N. Villere St.

JON PADGETT’s first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of 2016 by Rue Morgue Magazine. He has work out or forthcoming in PseudoPod, Lovecraft eZine, A Walk on the Weird Side, Antenna::Signals, and For Mortal Things Unsung. Padgett lives in New Orleans with his spouse, Carolyn Hembree, their daughter, a cat and a dog.

JOHN POPE, 68, is a contributing writer for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Pope, who has worked for The States-Item and The Times-Picayune, has won four first prizes from the Press Club of New Orleans, three first prizes from the Louisiana State Medical Societyand one from the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press Association. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Press Club of New Orleans in 2015. Also that year, he was elected to The Daily Texan Hall of Fame. Pope was part of The Times-Picayune team that won two Pulitzer Prizes, a George Polk Award, a National Headliner Award and the Medill Award for Courage in Journalism for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. “Getting Off at Elysian Fields,” an anthology of 123 of Pope’s obituaries and four New Orleans funerals that he covered, was published in October 2015 by the University Press of Mississippi. Pope is serving a six-year term in Phi Beta Kappa’s Senate, and he sits on the board of New Orleans Artists Against Hunger and Homelessness. He is a member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of Professional Obituary Writers, whose members refer to themselves as Grimmies.