Stories & Beer | Mike ‘n’ Molly’s | Saturday | 4:30 p.m.(ish) | FREE
Well golly, folks. It looks like it might be time for some more stories (okay, some poems too) and some more beer. This time, we’re very excited to bring you a fantastic lineup featuring two headliners in Scott Garson and Lania Knight. Both Scott and Lania are coming off of some significant critical success with Scott’s new book Is That You, John Wayne? receiving some love from Publishers Weekly, and Lania’s book Three Cubic Feet being a finalist for the prestigious Lambda Literary Award in the catagory of Debut LGBTQ fiction.
Both of them will have their books available for sale at the reading, along with Matt Minicucci whose chapbook Reliquary was recently published by Accents Publishing. This distinguished trio will be joined by graduating Fiction MFAer Michael Don, UIUC’s English and Digital Humanities Librarian/S&B veteran Harriett Green, and UIUC Creative Writing Department Lecturer (and Rate My Professor’s Hot Pepper haver) Miguel Jimenez.
Seriously, people. Stories & Beer will be killing it on Saturday. We’ll be killing it, and we’ll be killing it for you. Seriously. We can’t wait to see you there!
Here are some reader bios. Some of them I wrote; some of them the readers wrote; others were a true collaborations. Enjoy.
Scott Garson didn’t submit a bio because he’s too busy reading and re-reading Publishers Weekly‘s review of his badass book. He likes long walks on the beach, quite moments of spiritual contemplation, and spends way too much time on Craigslist.
Lania Knight‘s first book, Three Cubic Feet, has been selected as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction. She’ll find out in five weeks if she is the winner. Bribes to the judges are welcome. A new essay of hers will be up at Literary Mama online in August, and she has a story in the most recent edition of New Stories from the Midwest, edited by John McNally.
In terms of bios, Matthew Minicucci never knows what to do. Take this bio, for example, in which Matt emailed me, asking: “You all have clever bios and shit, right?” before going on to state, “I’m not very clever. I just have my standard ‘this is the shit Matt has done’ bio. Feel free to riff on my personhood and the implications therein.” This sums up Matt Minicucci in so many ways.
Michael Don is ethnically ambiguous and about to be ABE (all but employed). His stories have recently appeared in The Southampton Review, Vestal Review, Wag’s Revue, and Hobart.
Harriett Green is the English and Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a book reviewer for Contrary Magazine, and previously earned an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chicago.
Miguel Jimenez is a fiction writer from Chicago. He was almost published in The New Yorker. Almost published in the Paris Review. And almost published in The Atlantic. In 2009, Miguel partied with Snoop Lion (the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg).