Room 220 Fall Reading Series Lineup Announced!!!

Room 220 is pleased to announce three stellar bouts of live prose soon to transpire at the Antenna Gallery, 3161 Burgundy St. in the Bywater.

The Rm220 monthly reading series features local and visiting prose practitioners sharing their work and provides an opportunity for the downtown readerly and writerly communities to gather, converse, and gesticulate. (Of course uptown readers and writers are welcome as well! Come on down! No West Bank fools, though. Or Mid-City jerks … Kidding.) The events are always free and free booze is generally provided to patrons 21+ (hobos are limited to one beer unless they pass a short English exam).

More information about each of these readings— including interviews with the writers, excerpts from their books, and pictures of them looking handsome—will appear on Room 220 as the event dates draw closer. Until then:

SEPTEMBER 29 – 7 p.m.

MICHAEL MARTONE short story collection release party – Four for a Quarter (FC2)
With Christopher Hellwig and Michael Lee

Michael Martone’s cult status spreads far and wide in the world of independent letters. He is the author of several books of fiction and essays, including Michael Martone; Double Wide; Racing in Place; and Flatness and Other Landscapes, which won the 1998 AWP Prize for creative nonfiction. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Story, The Best American Essays and The Best American Stories, among many other places. He has taught at the University of Alabama since 1996, and previously at Harvard and Syracuse Universities.

Christopher Hellwig and Michael Lee, two of Martone’s former students and current New Orleans residents, comprise the literary duo The Brothers Goat. Lee’s forthcoming collection of short stories, Something in My Eye, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Francine Prose. Christopher Hellwig is an instructor of English at the University of New Orleans and former editor of The Black Warrior Review.

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OCTOBER 27 – 7 p.m.

MARK YAKICH novel release party – A Meaning for Wife (Ig Press)
With Laura Ellen Scott

Mark Yakich is a celebrated poet whose books include Green Zone New Orleans, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, and Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, which won the 2003 National Poetry Series prize. He is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans and recently won a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at the University of Lisbon. A Meaning for Wife is his first novel.

Laura Ellen Scott’s new novel, Death Wishing (Ig Press), is a fantastical account of a burgeoning cape and corset maker in New Orleans whose ability to kill cats and conjure Elvis (vintage 1968) with his wishes proves more troublesome than one might imagine. Scott divides her time between the suburbs of northern Virginia and the mountains of the West Virginia panhandle. She teaches at George Mason University.

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NOVEMBER 21 – 7 p.m.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN book release party – Pulphead (FSG)
With Nathaniel Rich

John Jeremiah Sullivan is the Southern Editor of The Paris Review, a contributing editor to Harper’s, a frequent contributor to New York Times Magazine, GQ, and The Oxford American, and recipient of a National Magazine Award. He is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son (FSG). His new book, Pulphead, is a collection of his best magazine writing from the past decade. Sullivan lives in North Carolina.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of a novel, The Mayor’s Tongue (FSG), and frequently contributes to Harper’s, Bookforum, and The New York Review of Books. He is former fiction editor of The Paris Review and a recent transplant to New Orleans. Clancy Martin once borrowed his pants.