It’s My Party, I’ll Cry If I Want To
A 10th Birthday Bash for Electric Literature and The Rumpus
AWP 2019: Portland
Sponsored by Aevitas Creative Management
Two of your favorite online literary sites are turning 10 this year, which is basically 100 in Internet years. Help Electric Literature and The Rumpus move into double digits and celebrate a ten years of championing new voices and creating a home for literature online. Six of our cherished contributors will read on the theme, “It’s my party, I’ll cry if I want to.” Then we’ll hang out, have drinks, eat cake, and reminisce about the last decade. You would cry too, if happened to you!
Free drinks and birthday cake (while supplies last).
Readings from Kaveh Akbar, Marie-Helene Bertino, Ryan Chapman, Bonnie Chau, R.O. Kwon, and Talin Tahajian! Readings will begin promptly at 7pm and conclude by 8pm.
AUTHOR BIOS:
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of CALLING A WOLF A WOLF (Alice James/Penguin UK 2017) and a chapbook, PORTRAIT OF THE ALCOHOLIC, published by Sibling Rivalry. The recipient of a Levis Reading Prize and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Kaveh is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novel 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES, and was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. Her work has received The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Story Prize, and has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches at NYU, The New School, and Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her third book, PARAKEET, is forthcoming from FSG in Spring 2020.
Ryan Chapman is a Sri Lankan-American writer originally from Minneapolis, and the author of the novel RIOTS I HAVE KNOWN, to be published by Simon & Schuster in May. His work has appeared online at The New Yorker, GQ, Bookforum, BOMB, Guernica, Electric Literature, and The Believer. A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts, he lives in upstate New York.
Bonnie Chau is from Southern California, where she ran writing programs at the nonprofit 826LA. She received her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University. A Kundiman fellow, she works at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn and is associate web editor at Poets & Writers. She is the author of the short story collection ALL ROADS LEAD TO BLOOD.
R.O. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, THE INCENDIARIES, was published in 2018 by Riverhead. The book is an American Booksellers Association Indie Next #1 Pick and Indies Introduce selection, and it was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Talin Tahajian grew up near Boston. Her poetry has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, Iowa Review Online, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, and Copper Nickel. She edits poetry for Big Lucks and the Adroit Journal, and is a MFA candidate in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
ABOUT EL: Electric Literature is a nonprofit digital publisher with the mission to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. We are committed to publishing work that is intelligent and unpretentious, elevating new voices, and examining how literature and storytelling can help illuminate social justice issues and current events. We are particularly interested in writing that operates at the intersection of different cultures, genres, and media.
Electric Literature began as a quarterly journal in 2009 and became a non-profit in 2014. In addition to the essays, criticism, and literary news on this site, you’ll find our acclaimed weekly literary magazines: Recommended Reading, which publishes short story and novel excerpts with personal recommendations, and The Commuter, our home for flash fiction, poetry, and graphic narrative.
ABOUT THE RUMPUS: We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power.
ABOUT AEVITAS: Aevitas Creative Management is a full-service literary agency, home to more than twenty agents in six cities (New York, Boston, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle), representing scores of award-winning authors, thinkers, and public figures.
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