ILLUMINATION TIME! It’s getting darker and we’re starting earlier. At the November 17th Sunday Salon, four marvelous, multi-talented writers usher in the light with their award-winning prose. Come find warmth by the literary fire. What more? Beautiful books for sale and DJ DubSix at the turntable. At Von Bar, 3 Bleecker St. 3pm. Please note our new start time! (Yeah, that sweet spot after brunch and before dinner.)
Ed Pavlić’s new book is the novel, Another Kind of Madness. He has published nine other books, most recently: Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener (2016), Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno (2015) and Visiting Hours at the Color Line (2013). His next book, poems, Let It Be Broke, will appear in 2020. In 2018 his essays appeared in Boston Review, the New York Times, and Brick, A Literary Journal as well as at The Poetry Foundation. He is Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. As a toddler, she came to the US with her parents from the Philippines. She grew up in New England and became a US citizen in her twenties. She thought she was going to be a physician, like her parents, but while attending Tufts University, she decided to become a writer. She graduated from the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine and then taught in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. She returned to Tufts University, where for many years, she taught writing in the English Department and courses in the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has published in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and many others. She is a longtime member and teacher at Grub Street, an independent creative writing center, and lives outside of Boston with her husband. Currently, Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book. For more, go to http://gracetalusan.com/
Kelly Tsai is an award-winning artist, writer, filmmaker, and music artist/producer based in Brooklyn. Her memoir-in-progress, The Invisible Word, won the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature and has been nominated for the 2019 New York Community Trust Ellen Levine Prize. Her work as a spoken word poet has been featured at over 700 venues worldwide including the White House under Obama, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, and multiple times on HBO. She is an alum of the Kundiman, Hedgebrook, Callaloo, Cave Canem, and VONA writing workshops and residencies. Her work has been profiled by Forbes, NPR, and other outlets. Her award-winning short films have screened in the US and abroad, and her interdisciplinary performances have been presented in the US and abroad including Brooklyn Museum and the Taipei Poetry Festival. She has been recently selected as a member of Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective to develop her feature film and music video projects. @kellytsai_nyc, kellytsai.com.
As a Navy brat, Robert Yune moved 11 times by the time he turned 18. After graduating from Pitt, he lived in Pittsburgh for the next 15 years. In the summer of 2012, he worked as a stand-in for George Takei and has appeared as an extra in commercials and movies such as Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Fathers and Daughters. Yune’s fiction has been published in Green Mountains Review, The Kenyon Review, and Pleiades, among others. In 2009, he received a writing fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2015, his debut novel Eighty Days of Sunlight was nominated for the International DUBLIN Literary Award. Other nominees that year included Lauren Groff, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. His debut story collection Impossible Children won the 2017 Mary McCarthy Prize and was published in October 2019 by Sarabande Books.
This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
