Fiction Reading with PEN Members Marie-Helene Bertino, Dina Nayeri, and Paul Rome

Join PEN American Center staff and members for drinks, readings, and conversation at the venerable KGB Bar in the East Village for one of the longest-running reading series in NYC. This evening will feature new, longtime, and soon-to-be PEN members reading from recent works and forthcoming novels. 

Alena Graedon‘s debut novel will be published by Doubleday in 2014. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Believer, as well as in French in issue 1 of Le Believer. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and elsewhere. She was formerly the manager of Membership and Literary Awards at PEN, and has worked for free at many other New York literary institutions. 

James Hannaham, author of the novel God Says No (McSweeney’s 2009), has published stories in One Story, Fence, Open City, The Literary Review and BOMB (Winter 2012). He has contributed to the Village Voice and other publications, often as an arts critic, and he co-founded Elevator Repair Service, performing with Ralph Lemon, Clarinda Mac Low, and David Levine. More recently he has exhibited text-based artwork at Samsøn Projects, Rosalux Gallery, 490 Atlantic in Brooklyn. James’s hopefully upcoming second novel is now known as Delicious Foods. He teaches fiction workshops at The Pratt Institute and Columbia University.

A.M. Homes is the author of the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels This Book Will Change Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the story collections The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know and the travel book Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill. Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages. The recipient of numerous awards, she has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, McSweeney’s, One Story, The New York Times and Vanity Fair, where she is a Contributing Editor. She lives in New York City.

Hannah Tinti is the author of Animal Crackers and the best-selling novel The Good Thief. In 2002 she co-founded the award-winning magazine One Story, where she received the PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing. She currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University’s MFA program and the Museum of Natural History. Hannah is also the Literary Commentator on the Public Radio program Selected Shorts.