Rain or shine (or probably both), October brings diverse, award-winning writers to the Salon stage and we can’t wait! Let’s raise a glass to compelling literary voices, noteworthy books, and sweeter fall weather. See you at Jimmys no. 43. At 7pm.
Vanessa Blakeslee’s first collection of stories Train Shots won the 2014 Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal for Short Story Fiction and has been optioned as a feature film by writer/director Hannah Beth King. Her debut novel is titled Juventud.
Orlando Ferrand was born in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, and moved to New York City in his late teens. His memoir Apologia: Cuban Childhood in My Backpack, received a 5-star rating by Readers’ Favorite in 2012, and was selected as the Book-of-the-Semester by Hostos Community College, CUNY, in the spring of 2012. Ferrand’s collection of poetry, Citywalker, won the Gold Medal in the Readers’ Favorite Book Review and Award Contest in 2011. He also won the Linden Lane Press Poetry Prize in 2011 for his book La Otra Isla (Spanish Edition). A graduate of City College and Columbia University, he teaches at numerous colleges and universities.
Anu Jindal’s short stories have appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommened Reading, Joyland, The New Quarterly, Pioneer, and Matrix Magazine. His story “Not a Bad Bunch” was selected by Amazon to be a Kindle Single and Audible audiobook in 2014. Currently an NYC Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, he resides in Brooklyn and teaches Creative Writing at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Asali Solomon received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for the stories later collected in Get Down, her first book, which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. In 2007 she was named one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” Solomon teaches English literature and creative writing at Haverford College.
