NYC | January 24, 2016

We’re kicking off 2016 with an event to celebrate the international anthology A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance and One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. Join us in welcoming these wonderful writers to the Salon stage for what will be a compelling evening. Jimmys no. 43. At 7pm.

Gina Apostol’s last novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She recently finished a fourth novel, The Unintended, anthologized in A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance (Tramp Press 2015). She is working on William McKinley’s World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

Mark Doten is the author of a novel, The Infernal, published by Graywolf Press in 2015. He wrote the libretto for composer Ted Hearne’s The Source, an oratorio about Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks, which had its world premiere at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in October 2014, and was named one of the best classical recordings of 2015 by the New York Times. He is the literary fiction editor at Soho Press and lives in Brooklyn.

Naheed Elyasi was born in Afghanistan, and like many Afghans, her family fled soon after the invasion by the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States. Ms. Elyasi is currently a Communications and Marketing Executive with over ten years of experience in both the corporate and non-profit sectors. She is also founder of burqa and stilettos, an online community to empower Middle Eastern and South Asian women. She was a contributing writer for Zeba Magazine, the first lifestyle Magazine for the Afghan Diaspora. Her writings are published in One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature, and Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of Muslim Women. She has recently finished her first fiction novel, cupcakes and condoms. Ms. Elyasi also serves on the guidance team for the Moral Courage Project, which educates young people to challenge intellectual conformity, based at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

Belinda McKeon is the author of Solace (2011), which won the 2011 Faber Prize and was voted Irish Book of the Year, as well as being shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her second novel, Tender, was published by Picador in June 2015, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. It will be published in the US by Lee Boudreaux Books in February 2016. Her essays and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, the Guardian, A Public Space, and elsewhere. As a playwright, she has had work produced in Dublin and New York, and is currently under commission to the Abbey Theater. She is the editor of A Kind of Compass, published by Tramp Press. Originally from Ireland, she has lived in New York since 2005 and teaches at Rutgers University.

Sahar Muradi is a writer and performer born in Afghanistan and raised in the U.S. She is co-editor, with Zohra Saed, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature and co-founder of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association. Her writing has appeared in Drunken Boat, dOCUMENTA, phati’tude, Green Mountains Review, elsewhere, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. She is the recipient of an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Open City Fellowship, the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award in Poetry, and a Kundiman Poetry Fellowship. Sahar has an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, an MPA in international development from New York University, and a BA in creative writing from Hampshire College. She lives in New York City, where she coordinates the poetry programs at City Lore.