We’re back after the snowstorm with a Sunday Salon on February 22, featuring Cortney Lamar Charleston, Michael Lowenthal, Svetlana Satchkova, and Claire W. Zhang. These brilliant poets and writers bring restless, intimate work—poetry, fiction, and memoir—where ghosts, grudges, and glittering accidents flicker and refuse easy answers. DJ DubSix will set the vibes. We can’t wait to see you there! 5pm at Von Bar, 3 Bleecker St.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; Doppelgangbanger(Haymarket Books, 2021), named a best book of 2021 by the New York Public Library and The Boston Globe; and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2026). He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review and many other periodicals and anthologies. Charleston currently serves on the Haymarket Books Poetry Advisory Board.
Michael Lowenthal is the author of a story collection, Sex with Strangers, and four novels: The Same Embrace, Avoidance, Charity Girl (a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007” pick), and The Paternity Test (an Indie Next selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist). His shorter work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, Guernica, The Southern Review, and many anthologies. The recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Mass Cultural Council, he has taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College, and as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. For more than twenty years he was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. Lowenthal’s most recent book is a memoir-in-essays, Place Envy, published in February 2026. He lives in Boston and Pittsburgh.
Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and novelist who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She covers culture and politics, with bylines in the Rumpus, Newsweek, LARB, the Independent, and others. Currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU, she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn. Svetlana has published three novels in Russian; The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, is her English-language debut.
Claire W. Zhang is a short story writer born on the border between China and North Korea. After business school and a corporate career, she made poorer decisions. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, Hobart, The Normal School, Another Chicago Magazine, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for RedNote Life Writing Award; the piece will appear in the A Day in the World anthology. She edits fiction at The Baltimore Review.