BROOKLYN READING WORKS

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  • April 19, 2012: Funny Pages: An Evening of Humor Curated by Marian Fontana
  • March 15 at 8 p.m.: In The Year of the Dragon
  • Feb 16, 2012 at 8 p.m.: New Plays by Brooklyn Playwrights
  • January 19, 2012: The Truth and the Ghost: Giving Voice
  • Next Reading is November 17, 2011: Make Mine a Double
  • Next Reading October 6, 2012: Transformations on the Tongue (Texts in Performance)
  • June 16 at 8PM: Coming to America with Writers from Nigeria, Trinidad & the Virgin Islands
  • May 19, 2011: Edgy Mother's Day at the Old Stone House in Park Slope
  • Next Reading on April 14: Voices From the East
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6th Annual Edgy Moms is May 10, 2012 at Two Moon Art House & Cafe



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May 10, 2012 at 8PM:Brooklyn Reading Workspresents the 6th Annual Edgy Moms, an annual reading of writing about motherhood and mothers by writers with sharp pens and razor fine wits, sponsored by Babeland. 
 

FREE GIFT BAGS FROM BABELAND PLUS FREE WINE AND REFRESHMENTS!

This year’s line up includes Elizabeth Laura Nelson, Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, Nicole Callihan, Karen Ritter, Jezra Kaye and special guests!

So what is an Edgy Mom?

She’s feisty and fun and a little bit zany. She whines to her friends and can be a bit of a martyr. She fantasizes about taking long trips without her children. She lets her kids have dessert before dinner and reheated pizza for breakfast. And she NEVER remembers to bring Cheeros or tissues to the playground. Except when she does and then she feels victorious.

Her kids have seen her fight, yell at her mother, and curse her sister on the phone. They’ve watched her cry. More than once. She’s been know to throw away her children’s old toys and art supplies when they’re not around. And then pretend she doesn’t know where they are when they ask.

And she knows not to miss Edgy Moms on May 10th because it’s gonna be a blast and the wine is free.

Jezra Kaye is the author of the novel, The Tattooed Heart, Rebel Heart, a Civil War romance novella and Kicking: Love Poems. She runs Speech for Success and has been a Fortune 500 speechwriter. Before that, she was a jazz singer and bandleader (she is a proud graduate of New England Conservatory of Music), and supported her jazz habit by working as a secretary,  a house cleaner, an accounts receivable clerk at J.C. Penney’s, a singing waitress, and an  overnight typist at the Brooklyn Supreme Court. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, and is the mother of an adult daughter.

Elizabeth Laura Nelson writes for xoJane. She lives in Brooklyn with two daughters and no dog, in spite of the fact that she promised her girls they’d get one. She writes, bakes, runs half-marathons, and spends many hours underground, getting herself and her children all the places they need to be. She is doing the best she can at any given moment. She’s getting that dog just as soon as she can.

Karen Ritter has spent decades in the advertising trenches, crafting copy for Dunkin’ Donuts and Weight Watchers. Faced with the task of persuading some people to gain weight and others to lose it eventually created a psychic split. Seeking refuge in fiction, Karen has completed one novel, Living With Men, and embarked on a second, The Other Ingrid Bergman. A mother of one, Karen is still traumatized by the autobiographical novel her own mother self-published nearly 35 years ago.

Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories and essays. Her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Salt Hill, New York Quarterly, North American Review and cream city review and has been translated into German and Spanish. A finalist for the Iowa Review’s Award for Literary Nonfiction, she was named as Notable Reading for Best American Non-required Reading and awarded Best of the Net 2010 for fiction.

Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer is a surfer, a runner, a writer and married to a nice Jewish boy named Seth. They are raising three kids in a big old beach house in Rockaway Beach, New York around the corner from Mildred and Irvin, her darling in-laws. Sounds like a sitcom, doesn’t it? She also runs the Queens Arts Council and is a grantmaker by profession, a writer by confession.

EXPERIENCE Brooklyn Reading Works, the reading series that has been called “The best place to chase fiction with a bit of history” by Conde Nast Traveler.  ”Once a month you can hear writers discuss themes ranging from “Make Mine a Double” – on women and  drinking –  to books by war veterans.”

BRW is a great night out for anyone who wants to be entertained and enlightened by acclaimed and emerging authors, and meet others who enjoy the same.

A $5 donation includes refreshments and wine.
Two Moons Art House & Cafe

315 Fourth Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11215

718-499-0460
For information and interviews louise_crawford@yahoo.com or 718-288-4290.

 

Posted by Louise Crawford on April 27, 2012 at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 19, 2012: Funny Pages: An Evening of Humor Curated by Marian Fontana


Funnypages

Brooklyn Reading Works presents Funny Pages: An  Evening of Humor curated by Marian Fontana on Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 8PM at The Old Stone House of Park Slope. A $5 donation includes wine and refreshments.

Author Marian Fontana knows funny and she is bringing together a great group of comic writers for this night of hilarity with Don Cummings, Ellen Ferguson, Gianna Messina, Billy Frolick, Blair Fell and Marian Fontana.  

Bios of the performers:

DON CUMMINGS' critically acclaimed plays have been produced on both coasts: His play, The Fat of the Land was a semifinalist for the Kaufman & Hart Award for new American comedy. A Good Smoke was a semifinalist for the Eugene O'Neill theater conference. It had a reading at The Public Theater in New York starring Meryl Streep and Debra Monk and has been optioned for Broadway. Piss Play is about Minorities so it’s Really Important was produced in the Summer Cringe Festival of 2009 where it received the Golden Pineapple award for best play. His latest play, Live Work Space, opens soon in Los Angeles. His collection of nonfiction essays are loosely held together in his yet-to-be-published memoir, Open Trench, named after his blog. He has acted in a lot of plays and been on a lot of sitcoms and writes movies and TV shows. Mr. Cummings is a graduate of Tufts University, The Neighborhood Playhouse and a member of The Dramatists Guild and the Ensemble Studio Theater Writer’s Unit. www.doncummings.net

BLAIR FELL has written for the television series Queer As Folk, andthe emmy-award winning Public Television show California Connected.His plays Naked Will, The Tragic and Horrible Life of the Singing Nun,From The Hip, Bargains and Blood, The Ballad of Little Girl Jesus etal have been performed around the world and have received numerousawards.  He has written charity and award show speeches for hundredsof celebrities, as well as the GLAAD Awards, Vimeo Awards and TheTrevor Project.  Along with writing for a number of pop culturewebsites, he writes a fiction blog called subwaysaints.com and the webseries Burninghabits.com.  His work can also be seen on blairfell.com.

ELLEN FERGUSON writes the "Diversity in the News" column for McSweeney's, and her nonfiction has also been published in Diversity Prep, Publisher's Weekly, and SPY.  Her McSweeney's column has been widely reprinted online.  Her poetry can be found online on identitytheory and the Brooklyn Reading Works, and in print in Long Island Quarterly.  Before she started teaching English, Satire and Nonfiction in New Jersey and New Hampshire, she worked at The New Yorker Magazine and SPY.

MARIAN FONTANA has been a writer and performer for over 20 years. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and most recently in the Guardian and on Salon.com. Her memoir, A Widows Walk published in 2005 by Simon and Schuster, was chosen as the Top Ten Great Reads of 2005 by People magazine and the Washington Post’s Book Raves of 2005. She most recently completedher second memoir, The Middle of the Bed.   Her essays have appeared in the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Time of My Life for Random House. She is currently collaborating on a musical.

BILLY FROLICK’S screenwriting credits include DreamWorks Animation's MADAGASCAR.  He has written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and Salon.com, and is the author of four book-length parodies, including The Ditches of Edison County, a national bestseller.

GIANNA MESSINA is a writer, producer and comedian who got her start as a baby model. Her work has appeared in  Dossier and Atlanta Style & Design magazine. She has performed stand-up at the Punchline in Atlanta and at the Metropolitan Room in New York and co-hosted the No Rules radio show with comedian Stu Levine. She is a graduate of Syracuse University Crouse College of Art and the High School for the Performing Arts where she majored in Drama. Gianna lives with her cat Clementine in Brooklyn in order to be closer to good bread and cannoli. She is gluten-free intolerant, enjoys the 3rdperson format of biographies and blogging on giannamessina.com.

In the cozy upstairs room at the Old Stone House, experience the reading series that Conde Nast Traveler called: "The Best Place to Chase Fiction with a Bit of History.

"Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House: Reconstructed from a 1699 Dutch farmhouse that played a key role in the Revolutionary War. Once a month you can hear up-and-coming Brooklyn writers discuss themes ranging from “Make Mine a Double”—on women and drinking—to books by war veterans (336 Third St.; 718-768-3195)."

It's great night out for anyone who wants to be entertained and enlightened by acclaimed and emerging artists, and meet others who enjoy the same.

The Old Stone House

336 Third Street

718-768-3195 or 718-288-4290 for information and interviews

Between Fifth and Fourth Avenues

Due to construction in the park, enter from the Fourth Avenue side of the house.

 

 

Posted by Louise Crawford on March 20, 2012 at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

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