Funny/Sexy/Sad plus The Morals and Atomic Candles for AWP 2019

The bi-coastal reading series Funny/Sexy/Sad comes to Portland for an AWP offsite reading, bringing writers and comedians together to make you feel something. Followed by music from campfire rock band The Morals and synthpop duo Atomic Candles.

Readers below.

Martha Grover is an author, poet, and artist living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of One More for the People (Perfect Day Publishing) and The End of My Career (Perfect Day Publishing). The End of My Career was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards in creative nonfiction in 2017. Her work has also appeared in The Collagist, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and The Portland Mercury, among others. She has been publishing her zine, Somnambulist, since 2003. Martha is currently at work on a graphic memoir. When she is not writing, Martha is making zines, art, and selling real estate.

Richard Scott Larson holds an MFA from New York University, where he works for the Expository Writing Program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Electric Literature, Joyland, Hobart, Booth, Wigleaf, Slant, and other venues, and his essay about queerness and Michael Myers was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2018. His work has also recently received support from the Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in St. Louis, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Zulema Renee Summerfield is a writer, educator, and creative coach. She is the author of Every Other Weekend, published by Little Brown and named a selection for the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award. Her short fiction has been published in a number of literary journals, including Guernica and Threepenny Review. A MacDowell Colony fellow, she lives in Portland, Oregon. www.zulemasummerfield.net

Amira Pierce got her MFA in Fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University (2011). She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at NYU, where she specializes in working with International students. Currently, she’s spending a semester teaching at NYU-Shanghai. She was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lives in Brooklyn. She’s at work on a novel and a collection of essays. Besides words, she’s into her cat, cooking, and city-biking. www.amirawpierce.com

Leeore Schnairsohn teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. His short story “Valentine Popa” is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly. His book reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Slavic and East European Journal, and Canadian-American Slavic Studies. He is writing a novel about love and literature in the next stage of the Anthropocene.

Amy Wang is an editor and writer based in Portland, where she spends most of her time wrangling text and visuals for The Oregonian. In her spare time, she focuses on essays and creative nonfiction, some of which has been published in literary anthologies, academic readers and other shadowy corners of the litverse. She is also working on a young adult novel.

Mara Jebsen is the author of ‘Alphabet,’ a chapbook Patrick Rosal describes as a “child’s abecedarium with a flash of Lear and a touch of history and bursts of exuberance amid Dadaist play.” Raised by folklorists in a blended family, Mara grew up in Philadelphia and in Lome, Togo. After completing her poetry degree through NYU’s graduate creative writing program, she began to publish in jubilat, the American Poetry Review, Hanging Loose Press, Boxcar Poetry Review, fogged clarity, Transitions Magazine, Broadsided Press and Painted Bride Quarterly. Mara is a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry. She lives in Brooklyn with her beloved and a crab-apple tree.

As one of the youngest rising comedians in Portland, Chris Johnson has made his way through the NW circuit in just four years of doing stand up based in his hometown. Nowadays he storms onto every stage with a heavy arsenal of quips and jabs at his parents, his relationships, anime, and of course, the surplus of caucasity that surrounds him in his everyday life.

The Morals is Casey Jarman and Ben Hubbird’s musical high five. Both aging somewhat ungracefully, they’ve been playing rough-hewn and overly-earnest “campfire rock” for their tens of fans for nearly twenty years now—finding time to play shows, write songs, and occasionally record them in between the rest of the stuff of life (Casey wrote a book called Death: An Oral History which you should definitely buy, Ben played with other bands, they started a record label together called Party Damage Records and were lucky enough to put out some really incredible records by some really incredible people, and both have landed in full-time music jobs). Expect an experience not unlike Elvis Costello and David Bazan getting in a fight and settling it with a shouting contest.

Atomic Candles is a synth-pop duo from Portland, Oregon. Founded by Wett Nurse bassist, Matt Bullock, he and synth-wizard Lizzy Acker have been blasting the New Wave-inspired goth music and laser light show throughout Portland and the Pacific Northwest since 2016. In 2018 the duo released their newest single, “Scorched Earth.”