We’re wrapping the season with a special Saturday edition of Sunday Salon and kicking off summer at the same time. Join us on June 7th from 4:30 to 6:30pm for our last event before the summer break and a toast to 23 years of community and great writing. We’re thrilled to welcome a dynamic group of writers whose work spans speculative fiction, poetry, memoir, and more. Their stories brim with truth and heart. DJ DubSix will be spinning before, during, and after the reading. Soak up the start of summer vibes with us at Von Bar, 3 Bleecker St.
Adanze Asante is a CUNY Adjunct Professor and a dark fantasy writer living in the Brooklyn community of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Her writing career stemmed from being a journalist for various publications such as Newsday, The New York Daily News, and The Oregonian. She received her master’s in journalism from U.C. Berkeley. She’s also a product of CUNY and received her bachelor’s from Brooklyn College and her associate’s from Kingsborough Community College. She’s a Clarion West graduate and wrote her second speculative-fiction novel, a novella, and a host of short stories. She is also a black belt and an Olympic weightlifter. Her work is featured in Omenana, Wrap Around South, African Voices, Middle House, and other publications. You can read her blog “Beyond Words” @ https://adanze1blog.com and find her on Instagram as Adanze1.
Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, was published in Spring 2025 by Nightboat Books.
Avitus B. Carle (she/her) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have been published in a variety of places including Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y Litmag, Fractured Lit., JMWW, SoFloPoJo, and elsewhere. Carle’s debut flash fiction collection, These Worn Bodies, was the winner of the 2023 Moon City Press Short Fiction award and is available through uapress.com (http://uapress.com/) or bookshop.org (http://bookshop.org/). She can be found at avitusbcarle.com (http://avitusbcarle.com/) or online everywhere @avitusbcarle.
Brian Gresko is a writer, illustrator, literary journalist, and educator based in Brooklyn. Their most recent book is You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing & Creativity. Gresko co-runs Pete’s Reading Series, Brooklyn’s longest running literary venue, and co-founded Writing Co-Lab, a teaching cooperative, through which they conceived and curated 100 Days of Creative Resistance.