We are thrilled to announce our AWP off-site event in playful cooperation with the Seattle-based improv company Unexpected Productions. The last time we were in Seattle, we did a similar event. It was a wacky evening of stories and improv based on our stories. We can’t wait to do this again, and we’d love for you to join us as we celebrate our 20th year of publishing.
Date: March 9
Time: 8pm
Place: The Market Theater, located in Pike Place Market, 1428 Post Alley How to get there:
On foot, go to the main entrance of the Pike Place Market at 1st and Pike. There, you’ll find Rachel, Pike Place Market’s full size brass piggy bank, beneath the neon sign and clock, right by the famous Pike Place Fish Company. From the pig, go down the stairs and around the corner into Post Alley, where you’ll find the Unexpected Productions at the Market Theater, along with the famous Gum Wall!
Purchase a Ticket — Select March 9 and Enter the promo code “smokelong” for $5 off the price! This promotion is available to the first 50 people who purchase a ticket.
The Readers
María Alejandra Barrios Vélez is a writer born in Barranquilla, Colombia. She has an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester and currently lives in Brooklyn. She was the 2020 SmokeLong Flash Fiction Fellow and her stories have been published in places such as Hobart Pulp, Reservoir Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, Shenandoah Literary, Vol.1 Brooklyn, El Malpensante, Moon City Review, Fractured Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly and The Offing. Her first novel, THE WOMEN OF CAMINITO, is forthcoming Spring 2024 by Lake Union Publishing.
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 the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.
Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the associate director of programs and finance for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South, where she also teaches creative writing.
Brendan Stephens is the recipient of an Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize and two Inprint Donald Barthelme Prizes. A recent graduate of the University of Houston’s PhD program, he currently teaches at East Carolina University. His work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Epoch, Pinch, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Rebecca Bernard‘s debut collection of stories, Our Sister Who Will Not Die, was selected by Nick White as the winner of the 2021 Non/Fiction Prize held by The Journal and was published by Mad Creek Books in August 2022. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, and Wigleaf among other venues. She is an Assistant Professor at Angelo State University and serves as a Fiction Editor for The Boiler.
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in The Atlantic, thenewyorker.com, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories Black Jesus and Other Superheroes in 2017. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write, which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize. She is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
Erin Vachon is a gender-fluid writer and editor living in Rhode Island. Their multi-Pushcart, Best of Net, and Best Microfictions nominated work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, and Brevity, among others. They are a Recipient of the SmokeLong Fellowship for Emerging Writers and an alum of the Tin House Summer workshop. You can find more of their writing at www.erinvachon.com.
Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collections The World Doesn’t Require You and Insurrections, which was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and has work in such publications as Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Offing. Originally from Buffalo, NY, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Sawers is the author of The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore, available from Rose Metal Press.
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