Where is all of the literary love for Queens? It’s right here at LIC Reading Series. Join them each week for stories, readings, and discussions with acclaimed writers, recorded with a live audience in the cozy carriage house of a classic pub in Long Island City, Queens, New York, and hosted by founder Catherine LaSota.
This week, the podcast features the reading and panel discussion from the LIC Reading Series event on November 13, 2018, with Heather Abel (The Optimistic Decade), Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond (Powder Necklace), and Ariel Schrag.
About the Readers:
Heather Abel’s debut novel, The Optimistic Decade, was published in May 2018. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the online Paris Review, among other places. She worked as a reporter and editor for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and High Country News, during which time she talked to gold miners, fossil hounds, Native American environmental activists, and really bored teens in rural Utah. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the New School University, and she’s taught writing at the New School, UMass Amherst, and Smith College. Raised in Santa Monica, she now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters, and she dreams of the Colorado high desert.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond has written for AOL, Parenting Magazine, the Village Voice, Metro, and Trace Magazine. Her short story “Bush Girl” was published in the May 2008 issues of African Writing and her poem, “The Whinings of a Seven Sister Cum Laude Graduate Working Board as an Assistant,” was published in 2006’s Growing up Girl Anthology. A cum laude graduate of Vassar College, she attended secondary school in Ghana. Powder Necklace is loosely based on the experience.
Ariel Schrag was born in Berkeley, California. She is the author of the novel Adam, and the graphic memoirs Awkward, Definition, Potential, Likewise, and Part of It. Potential was nominated for an Eisner Award and Likewise was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Schrag was a writer for the USA series Dare Me, based on the Megan Abbott novel, the HBO series Vinyl and How To Make It In America, and for the Showtime series The L Word. She has written comics and articles for The New York Times Book Review, Cosmopolitan, New York magazine, USA Today, and more. Her original art has showed in galleries across North America and Europe. Schrag graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. She teaches the course Graphic Novel Workshop in the writing department at The New School and has also taught classes at Brown University, New York University, Butler University, and Williams College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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This event was made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
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