Sunday, December 18 @ 5:00PM.

Raina J. León:
Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), CantoMundo fellow, and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013, Salmon Poetry), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). Her third book, sombra : (dis)locate, will be published in 2016. She has received fellowships and residencies with Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latino and Latina arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California. 

Simon J. Phillips:
Simon Phillips is a gardener, musician, and fiction writer living in San Francisco. He earned his MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015. He mentors for the PEN American Center's Prison Writing Mentorship Program, and runs a creative writing workshop out of his living room.

Melissa R. Sipin:
Nicknamed "small but terrible" by her lola, Melissa R. Sipin was born and raised in Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review's Flash Fiction Prize, and co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan Press 2014). Her work is in Guernica Magazine, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Eleven Eleven Magazine, and PEN American Center, among others. She cofounded and is editor-in-chief of TAYO Literary Magazine, and her fiction has won scholarships and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Poets & Writers Inc., Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman, VONA/Voices Conference, Squaw Valley's Community of Writers, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is hard at work on a short story collection and novel. More at: www.msipin.com.

Donald Quist will be reading from his new essay collection, HARBORS from Awst Press. 

About:
Donald Quist is a writer and English lecturer living in Bangkok, Thailand. He is author of the short story collection Let Me Make You a Sandwich and the nonfiction collection Harbors. His work has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, J Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Cleaver, The Adroit Journal, Pithead Chapel, Publishers Weekly and other print and online publications. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, runner-up for the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize and a winner of the E.L. Doctorow and Peter Matthiessen Authors Competition from the Writers’ Workshop of Asheville. He is co-host of the Poet in Bangkok podcast and serves as Fiction Editor for Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine. He received a fellowship from Kimbilio Fiction and earned his MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Find him online at iamdonaldquist.com.