A Little Box of Yes
October 12, 7:30pm, 118 Elliott Street, Brattleboro, VT.
We're going to play a round of Synapsis with five great writers and performers on the first night of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. It's gonna be fun. It'll be like if you cross Selected Shorts with Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me, and then threw in 44 Moth Slams.
Here's who is playing:
Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, The Ovid Prize from the Romanian Writer’s Union, the 2008 Merck Serono Literature Prize and the 2009 Fiction Award from The Writers’ League of Texas. Following the publication of his second novel, The Storm at the Door, Stefan was awarded The University of Texas Dobie-Paisano Fellowship. Stefan’s novels have been translated into ten languages, and his stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker Page-Turner, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, GRANTA, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Texas Monthly described his third novel, Oliver Loving, as “A charged and hopeful story of a West Texas family seeking a way forward in the aftermath of a school shooting.” He lives in Brooklyn.
Noy Holland’s latest work is I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories, out now from Counterpoint Press. Noy’s debut novel, Bird, came out in 2015 to much critical acclaim. Other collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). She has published work in The Kenyon Review, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two.
Matthew Dicks is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, Something Missing, Unexpectedly, Milo, The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs, Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling, and the upcoming The Other Mother and Cardboard Knight. His novels have been translated into more than 25 languages worldwide. Matthew is a 35-time Moth StorySLAM champion and 6-time GrandSLAM champion whose stories have been featured on their nationally syndicated Moth Radio Hour and their weekly podcast. He has also told stories for This American Life, TED, The Colin McEnroe Show, The Story Collider, The Liar Show, Literary Death Match, The Mouth, and many others.
Michael Preston has performed on Broadway and internationally with the Flying Karamazov Brothers and is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at Trinity College in Hartford. He served as co-director of Doug Elkins’ Fräulein Maria, a playful dance-imbued love letter to The Sound of Music, performed in New York, at Jacob’s Pillow, around the country and at Hartford Stage in June 2011. He also portrayed Egeus/Peter Quince in Darko Tresnjak’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in collaboration with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in January 2014. He is the newest Scrooge in the Hartford Stage production of A Christmas Carol.
GennaRose Nethercott is the author of The Lumberjack’s Dove, selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her other projects include A Ghost of Water (an ekphrastic collaboration with printmaker Susan Osgood) and the narrative song collection Modern Ballads. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Rust & Moth, PANK, and elsewhere, and she has been a writer-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Art Farm Nebraska, and the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris. She tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter– and is the founder of the Traveling Poetry Emporium, a team of poets-for-hire. Nethercott holds a degree in poetry, theatre, and folklore from Hampshire College.
It's gonna be awesome.