John Nimmo Reads at Peninsula Literary September 12, 2014
Our September reading found us near the end of a hot day, everyone still wishing for rain. Gallery House filled up quickly with friends of the series, and we settled in for the pleasure of being read to by the authors themselves.
It’s always a surprise to watch a reading unfold in real time after all that goes into putting the program together. Together, the diverse voices and elements make an experience that is somehow more than the sum of its parts.
Below are the bios of our September readers. Thank you to all of them, and to all who helped set up, tear down, and all who came to join us! We hope to have videos of the reading online soon. Please check back.
Jean Znidarsic and Carrie Hechtman, Peninsula Literary
First Half
Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Stanford, where she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and held a Jones Lectureship; and in the MFA program at San Francisco State. Her fiction has been published in numerous literary journals, and won a TransAtlantic Review prize. She’s the author of six books, including creative writing textbooks, The Making of a Story and Method and Madness (both published by Norton), and the novels, Turn of Mind, and Circle of Wives,which was published earlier this year.
Lita Kurth has an MFA from Rainier Writers Workshop and has work accepted or published in FjordsReview, Redux, Raven Chronicles, Main Street Rag, Tikkun, NewVerseNews, Blast Furnace, eliipsis…literature and art, Compose, Tattoo Highway, Composite Arts, Verbatim Poetry, the Santa Clara Review, Vermont Literary Review, and others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her CNF “This is the Way We Wash the Clothes,” presented at the Working Class Studies conference, 2012, won the 2014 Diana Woods Memorial Award (summer-fall 2014) and appeared in Lunchticket 2014. She contributes to Tikkun.org/tikkundaily, TheReviewReview.net, and classism.org. In 2013, she co-founded the Flash Fiction Forum, a reading series in San Jose. She teaches writing and creative writing at De Anza College and in private workshops.
Noorulain Noor is a clinical researcher at Stanford University and the poetry editor of Papercuts. Papercuts is a publication of Desi Writers’ Lounge, an online writing community for emerging South Asian writers, run entirely on a voluntary basis. Noorulain’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in ARDOR literary magazine, The Bangalore Review, Apeiron Review, Clapboard House, Blue Lake Review, aaduna, and other journals. Raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Noorulain now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she leads poetry workshops, blogs, and writes on the broad themes of identity, multiculturalism, and the immigrant experience.
Papercuts Magazine: http://desiwriterslounge.net/papercuts/
Blog: http://gollgappay.blogspot.com/
Erin Byrne writes travel essays, poetry, fiction and screenplays. Her work has won numerous awards, including Travelers’ Tales Grand Prize Solas Awards for Travel Story of the Year, and appears in a variety of publications, including World Hum and Best Travel Writing. Erin is writer of The Storykeeper, an award-winning film about occupied Paris. She is occasional guest instructor at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, and is co-editor of Vignettes & Postcards From Paris, the first in a series of anthologies based on her workshops in different parts of the world. http://www.e-byrne.com
–Intermission
Peninsula Literary Series, Sept 12, 2014
Reader Bios
Second Half
David Roderick’s first book of poems, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize. This fall, the Pitt Poetry Series published his second book, The Americans. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and hosts The Late Nite Poetry Show, an interview series on The Rumpus.
Rebekah Pickard studies with Peter Orner and Nona Caspers in the MFA fiction program at SF State. Glimmer Train named her short story, Pray Down the Rain, on the Top-25 list of their September 2012 fiction open contest. She is currently working on a novel with the working title of I Am My Brother’s River, the story of two brothers growing up together in rural Missouri in the 1920s.
John Nimmo has been seriously hooked on poetry since the mid 1990s. His poems have appeared in various online and paper journals, including Stirring, Rattle, Sand Hill Review, Pirene’s Fountain, and DMQ Review. He has an active career as an environmental physicist, and lives with his wife Elsa in Menlo Park.
