We are excited to announce our single-author reading schedule for A SmokeLong Summer. These readings with May-Lan Tan, Steve Almond, Deesha Philyaw, and Kathy Fish are free of charge when you book A SmokeLong Summer.
May-Lan Tan
June 12 (1pm Berlin / 9pm Sydney)
May-Lan Tan is the author of the short story collection Things to Make and Break and the chapbook Girly. She is a recipient of the 2021 Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Atlas Review, the Reader, and Areté.
Steve Almond
July 2 (2pm Massachusetts / 7pm London)
Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. You can check those out here.
His recent books include William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, which is about reading and writing and the struggle to pay attention to our lives, and Bad Stories, a literary investigation of the 2016 election.
His new book, which comes out in April, 2022, is a novel called All the Secrets of the World. Pre-order here »
For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. His short stories have been anthologized widely, in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. He also publishes crazy, DIY books.
Deesha Philyaw
July 17 (2pm Pittsburgh / 7pm London)
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, dead housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Harvard Review, ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Baltimore Review, TueNight, Ebony and Bitch magazines, and various anthologies. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.
Kathy Fish
August 6 (11am Denver / 1pm NYC / 6pm London)
Kathy Fish’s stories have been widely published in journals, anthologies, and textbooks. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Washington Square Review, the Norton Reader, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America (2023). Honors include the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize and a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship. The author of five short fiction collections, Fish teaches a variety of creative writing workshops online. She also publishes a popular monthly craft newsletter. Subscribe here: The Art of Flash Fiction.
Included in the price of SmokeLong Fitness: