Writers emerge yet again from the Black Widow Salon Feb. 18

The Black Widow Salon, a regular showcase of local and visiting writers, will host five “emerging” writers from 7 – 9 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 18, at Crescent City Books (230 Chartres St.). This event—which showcases young-ish, littler-known local writers new and veteran to the city—is a follow-up to another BWS event one year ago that did the same.

This year’s emerging writers are:

Michael Jeffrey Lee, a Room 220 favorite, is the author of the outstanding short story collection Something In My Eye, fiction editor of the New Orleans Review, and the current visiting writer at the University of Louisiana – Lafayette (though he lives in New Orleans and also teaches at NOCCA). Read the Room 220 interview with Lee and the BOMB interview with him. Lee is also one part of HAWN, a mind-bending musical debacle that will perform later this month at the Antenna gallery for the launch of the new Press Street chapbook We’re Pregnant.

Geoff Munsterman has three chapbooks: Jaw, Tunnel, and According to the Drunken Elders of my Past.  He has been published in YAWP, The Double Dealer, Steel Toe Review, and elsewhere.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepot.

Justin Nobel, a recent transplant to the city, is the author of a book about observing the minutiae of New York City called Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle.   His writing has appeared in Tin House, Guernica, Orion, and Meatpaper, and his essay The Last Inuit of Quebec was published in Best American Travel Writing 2011. He’s presently at work on his next book, a shamanistic travel guide to the South.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a third-year MFA student at the University of New Orleans. He is a member of several writing collectives, including the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance and the Melanated Writers of New Orleans. Ruffin’s work has been published in the Apalachee Review, Regarding Arts & Letters, South Carolina Review, and the University of New Orleans’s Ellipsis. His short story The Pie Man received the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop’s 2011 Ernest Svenson Fiction Award.  He is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Kat Stromquist is a third-year MFA student at UNO’s creative writing workshop.  Her work has appeared in the literary magazines Crescent City Review, Espresso Ink, Off Channel, Gambling the Aisle, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Mutabilis Press’ Improbable Worlds anthology, and elsewhere.  She also works as a freelance journalist.