ROOM 220 presents Amy Berkowitz, Chanel Clarke, Aran Donovan, Elizabeth Gross, Megan McHugh & Cassie Pruyn

ROOM 220 presents Amy Berkowitz in celebration of her book Tender Points at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 3, 2017, at Antenna Gallery (3718 St. Claude Ave.). Free and open to the public, the event will also feature readings by New Orleans women’s workshop members Chanel Clarke, Aran Donovan, Elizabeth Gross, Megan McHugh, and Cassie Pruyn.

Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points, the editor of Mondo Bummer Books, the co-organizer of Sick Fest, and the host of the Amy’s Kitchen Organics reading series. She was the inaugural writer in residence at Alley Cat Bookstore and Gallery, and she loves independent bookstores very much. She lives in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco.

Chanel Clarke was born in Louisiana. She received her MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Flag and Void, Hayden Ferry’s Review, Bayou, Anti-, and other journals. She lives in New Orleans and studies social work at Tulane University.

Aran Donovan works and writes in New Orleans. A graduate of the Arkansas MFA program and Middlebury Summer Language Schools, she was a 2012 resident at the Edward A. Albee Foundation and a 2010 Walton Family Endowment for Creative Writing fellow. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Barrow Street, CutBank, Rattle, and New Ohio Review, New Orleans Review, and Rattle, and has earned her Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Award and a spot in Best New Poets 2013.

Elizabeth Gross is a poet/translator/teacher/baker in New Orleans. Her chapbook Dear Escape Artist came out from Antenna :: Press Street in 2016. More poems have recently appeared in Okey-Panky, White Stag, TENDERLOIN, and the Fairy Tale Review.

Megan McHugh is a poet, essayist and flower farmer in New Orleans.

Cassie Pruyn is a New Orleans-based writer born and raised in Portland, Maine. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a BA from Bard College. Her poems and reviews have appeared in AGNI Online, The Normal School, 32 Poems, The Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, The Adroit Journal and many others. She is the author of Bayou St. John: A Brief History (The History Press, 2017), and Lena, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry (Texas Tech University Press, 2017). She teaches at Bard Early College in New Orleans.