Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents “Animal”

Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme Animal June 14 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5.  Animalis. Latin for “having breath.” Join us for a night of readings that will surely take your breath away!  

Tami Anderson

Tami Anderson’s fiction has been published in Other Voices, Passages North, and Soundings East. Her work was selected for a stand-alone performance of The New Short Fiction Series, Los Angeles’s longest running spoken word series. She was a 2006 recipient of the Barbara Jackson Fellowship to the Tomales Bay Writer’s Conference.

Dani Burlison

Dani Burlison is a staff writer at the Pacific Sun, columnist at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and book reviewer for The Los Angeles Review. Her writing appears in The Rumpus, Hip Mama Magazine, Rad Dad Zine, Bike Monkey, Elephant Journal, The North Bay Bohemian, and elsewhere. She has essays forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Plowshares, and two anthologies: The People’s Apocalypse and It’s All in Her Head: Women Making Peace With Troubled Minds. She is the co-founder of Petals and Bones zine and writing workshops, and lives in Sonoma County.

Carolyn Cooke

Carolyn Cooke’s Daughters of the Revolution was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, and two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. These stories were collected in The Bostons, which won the PEN/Bingham Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Bruce Genaro is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco, and he has the scars to prove it. His short stories, essays, profiles, and reviews have appeared in numerous obscure and hard to find literary magazines and journals, as well as more notable venues like the Huffington Post. You can read his most recent publication, “Workshopped to Death,” in the 2012 issue of The Alembic, the annual literary journal of Providence College. He is currently working on a book about The Outsiders, a group of seven Bay Area plein air painters, and a novel about the last prince of Italy.

Allison Landa

Allison Landa is a Berkeley-based fiction and memoir writer. Her work has been featured in Salon Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Swill Magazine, Toasted Cheese, Pindeldyboz, and Defenestration, among other venues, and featured at reading series including Lip Service West, Quiet Lightning, Pints and Prose, and Porchlight SF. She has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Julia and David White Artists’ Colony. She earned her MFA in fiction writing at St. Mary’s College of California.

Matt Runkle

Matt Runkle is a writer, cartoonist, and book artist. His work has been featured in The Collagist, Beecher’s, Monkeybicycle, and on BOMBlog. He has read at venues ranging from SOMArts and Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books to the Headlands Center for the Arts. The third issue of his zine, Runx Tales, is due out later this year. Brooklyn Arts Press will publish a collection of his short fiction in 2013, and he is looking for a publisher for his novel,”Twos”, which was a semifinalist for the Noemi Book Award.

James Tipton

James Tipton is the author of Annette Vallon, A Novel of the French Revolution, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick. Born and raised in Berkeley, he has a PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. He has been a lecturer at UC Davis and at the University of Bordeaux, France, and has taught English and creative writing at the College of Marin since 1993.

Justin Torres was raised in upstate New York. His work has appeared in Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller.