Hallelujah! The season of illumination is arriving and just in time. Join us on March 18th for the Ninth Annual Dark Tower Reading at Sunday Salon. A rising star comedian and DJ will share the stage with a stellar lineup of poets and writers of color. Ru Freeman, author and curator extraordinaire, will MC this literary celebration with a twist. Bring your dancing shoes! Head to Von Bar at 3 Bleecker St. At 7pm.
Elijah Bean was living with his parents in Alabama and writing poems in their kitchen several months ago. Now that isn’t so. Poet. Storyteller. Curator. elijahbean.com
Kanya D’Almeida is a Sri Lankan writer, editor and journalist. She was formerly the Race and Justice Reporter at Rewire. From 2013-2016 she held the post of Regional Editor for Asia and the Pacific at the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and has reported for IPS from the United Nations, Washington, Mexico and Sri Lanka. Her journalism has appeared on Al Jazeera, Truthout, Alternet, and The Margins. She is currently completing an MFA in Fiction Writing at Columbia University.
Christine Kendall grew up in a family of artists, the fourth of six children, where everyone studied the piano along with one other instrument. She still feels sorry for the neighbors. They woke up one morning and found themselves living next door to a flute, two clarinets, a french horn, a cello, a set of drums, and always, always somebody on the piano. Christine wasn’t any good on the clarinet but she loved writing. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College and studied children’s literature at the Southampton Writers’ Conference. Christine’s short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and her debut novel, Riding Chance, published by Scholastic in October 2016, was nominated for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work for Youth/Teens. Christine lives in Philadelphia, PA where she co-curates the Cannery Lounge Reading Series.
Shreyas Manohar is a graduating senior at Columbia University majoring in English and Creative Writing. He’s a stand-up comic and performs regularly in comedy clubs in Mumbai and New York. He served as a writer for Season 1 of On Air With AIB, India’s first news comedy show on television. He’s previously worked as a cricket commentator, and as a prank-caller on the radio.
Geeta Tewari is a writer and human rights lawyer, born in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts after her parents emigrated from India. She has a BA from Cornell University, a JD from Fordham Law School and an MFA from Columbia University. Tewari now lives in New York, where she is raising her three daughters. Her stories have been published by Granta, Narrative Magazine, Caustic Frolic/NYU Center for Experimental Humanities and NY Tyrant. Learn more about her: Instagram @tewargirl, Twitter, @tewarigirl, www.geetatewari.com.
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GUEST DJ: DOUBLESIX was born and raised in Queens, NYC. He used to mix cassette tapes as a child and dropped needles to grooves as a teen, but now he curates soundscapes that make the night a night to remember. His selections tell stories and fill dance floors. They are why people say he is the “music man”. Remember to wear your dancing shoes when DOUBLESIX is juggling tunes. He is about musical revolution using the 1’s and 2’s.
GUEST MC: Ru Freeman is the author of the novels A Disobedient Girl (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf, 2013), a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book. Both novels have been translated into several languages including Italian, French, Hebrew, Dutch, and Chinese. She is the editor of the ground-breaking anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015). Her writing appears internationally including in the UK Guardian, the New York Times,and the Boston Globe. She blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics, is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and is the recipient of many fellowships including from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the 2014 winner of the Sister Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.
