Our Readers

The Rally marches on! We continue our season with Lisa Ko, Jonathan Vatner, and Molly McGhee. They’ll be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, November 7th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. Hosted by Ryan D. Matthews—The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Lisa Ko
Lisa Ko is the author of the novels Memory Piece and The Leavers, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Ko’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer.

Molly McGhee
Molly McGhee is from Nashville, Tennessee. She writes fiction, essays, and teaches at Columbia University where she serves as the Fiction Faculty Advisor in the undergraduate creative writing department. Her debut novel, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, was shortlisted by the VCU Cabell First Novel prize and was named a best book of the year by The Chicago Review, Electric Literature, and The Times. Her work has appeared in publications like The Paris Review and The Guardian. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jonathan Vatner
JONATHAN VATNER is the author of THE BRIDESMAIDS UNION (St. Martin's Press, 2022) and CARNEGIE HILL (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). His fiction has earned praise from People, Town & Country, The New York Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the managing editor of Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology and teaches fiction writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers Center.

The Rally marches on! We kick off election season with John Manuel Arias, Prachi Gupta, and Anjali Khosla. They’ll be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, October 3rd!

Come see our terrific slate of readers, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. Hosted by Ryan D. Matthews—The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

John Manuel Arias

John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer, and the National Bestselling author of Where There Was Fire, a Good Morning America Buzz Pick and Barnes & Noble Discover Pick. A Canto Mundo fellow & an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, his prose and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, PANK, The Rumpus, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts. 

Prachi Gupta

Prachi Gupta is an award-winning journalist and author whose debut memoir, They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us, was named one of the best books of 2023 by Amazon, one of the best memoirs of the year by Audible, nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award, and named a “book of the day” by NPR. 

Her reporting on data privacy and discrimination for Marie Claire was included in 2021's Best American Magazine Writing, and as a former senior reporter at Jezebel, she won a 2020 Writers Guild Award for her investigative essay, "Stories About My Brother." The essay was also named one of the best essays of 2019 by Longform and Longreads and a finalist for the South Asian Journalists Association Nonfiction Writing Award. In 2016, Prachi covered the presidential election for Cosmopolitan.com, where she "set the standard" for interviews with Ivanka Trump, per Media Matters; interviewed former First Lady Michelle Obama on her first solo trip to the Middle East; and traveled to Jordan to report on the refugee crisis. She has also written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post Magazine, the Guardian, Salon, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. Prachi frequently offers commentary on race, gender, mental health, and politics on outlets MSNBC and NPR, and speaks to students, educators, employees, and mental health professionals at colleges, nonprofits, and private companies across the country.

Anjali Khosla

Anjali Khosla is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Design at The New School, where she was the recipient of the university’s 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award. Her reporting and nonfiction has been published in outlets ranging from the New York Daily News to the Guardian. She is the recipient of a 2020 New York Press Club award, a 2021 South Asian Journalists Association award, and has also received recognition from the Los Angeles Press Club and the Eric Hoffer awards. She was a 2021 Nadya Aisenberg fellow at MacDowell, and has also been a resident at 33 Officina Creativa in Italy and Arteles in Finland. Her poetry chatbot and chapbook, Ghostbot, was published by Wendy’s Subway and Nor By Press in 2019.

The Rally marches on! We open our new season with Nell Freudenberger, Ben Purkert, and Anjali Khosla. They’ll be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, September 5th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Nell Freudenberger
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and son.

Ben Purkert
Ben Purkert’s debut novel, The Men Can’t Be Saved, was named one of Vanity Fair’s Top 20 Books of 2023. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and he’s been featured by NPR, Esquire, and The Boston Globe. He is also the author of the poetry collection, For the Love of Endings. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow. He teaches in the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program.

Anjali Khosla
Anjali Khosla is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Design at The New School, where she was the recipient of the university’s 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award. Her reporting and nonfiction has been published in outlets ranging from the New York Daily News to the Guardian. She is the recipient of a 2020 New York Press Club award, a 2021 South Asian Journalists Association award, and has also received recognition from the Los Angeles Press Club and the Eric Hoffer awards. She was a 2021 Nadya Aisenberg fellow at MacDowell, and has also been a resident at 33 Officina Creativa in Italy and Arteles in Finland. Her poetry chatbot and chapbook, Ghostbot, was published by Wendy’s Subway and Nor By Press in 2019.

The Rally marches on! We close out our season by celebrating Pride with Matt Ortile, Denny, and Joseph Lezza. They’ll be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, June 6th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Matt Ortile

Matt Ortile is the author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name and the co-editor of the nonfiction anthology Body Language. He is an editor for print and digital, as well as a columnist, at Condé Nast Traveler, and was previously the executive editor of Catapult magazine and the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. He has written for Esquire, Vogue, Out, Self, BuzzFeed News, and elsewhere; has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and MacDowell; and has taught writing classes at Kundiman, PEN America, and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He is a graduate of Vassar College, which means he now lives in Brooklyn, where he is working on a novel.

Denny

Denny is a writer, actor and musician who co-starred in POSE (FX), New Amsterdam (NBC) and guest-starred on City On Fire (Apple TV). Aside from appearing in The Grammy, Allure Magazine, PAPER and more, her 2021 essay "He Made Affection Feel Simple" was published in The New York Times’ Modern Love column. Outside of being the LGBTQ communities reporter at Reckon, the 2022 Periplus fellow is working on a debut single, a short film and a speculative nonfiction book.

Joseph Lezza

Joseph Lezza is a Pushcart-nominated writer on the east coast with an MFA in creative writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. His debut memoir in essays, I'm Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss (Vine Leaves Press), was a finalist for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award and the 2021 Prize Americana in Prose. His work has been featured in, among others, Longreads, Occulum, Variant Literature, The Hopper, West Trade Review, and Santa Fe Writers Project. His website is www.josephlezza.com and you can find him on the socials @lezzdoothis.

Rally Reading Series: Wei Tchou, Dena Igusti, and Sarah Wang

The Rally marches on! We continue our new season with Wei Tchou, Dena Igusti, and Sarah Wang taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, May 2nd!

Come see our terrific slate of readers, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Wei Tchou

Wei Tchou's essays and reporting can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Oxford American, among other publications. She likes to write about food, nature, and the complications of identity. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and has an MFA from Hunter College. She lives in New York City, where she is tending a lemon tree.

Dena Igusti

Dena Igusti is an Indonesian Muslim writer born and raised in Queens, New York. They are the author of CUT WOMAN which has been listed as a Perennial Award Winner, Harvard Bookstore Staff Pick, and Entropy Mag’s Best Of. Their work has been produced and performed at LA Times, The Brooklyn Museum, The Apollo Theater, The Public, and other venues. They are an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Open City Fellow, Best of the Net Nominee, Baldwin For The Arts Resident, and more.

Sarah Wang

Sarah Wang’s writing across genres focuses on mass incarceration, psychoanalysis, immigration, colonized bodies, feminism, class, and race. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Nonfiction Fellow, a 2021-2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, and a Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Nation, Harper's Bazaar, n+1, and McSweeney’s. She is a Tin House Scholar, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, and the winner of a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College.

Rally Reading Series: Po Murray, Antonius Wiriadjaja, and Lizzie Eaton

The Rally marches on! Join us for a night dedicated to gun violence prevention with all-star artists, activists, and survivors—Po Murray, Antonius Wiriadjaja, and Lizzie Eaton will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, April 4th! We’ll be raising money for Newtown Action Alliance, an organization dedicated to reversing escalating gun violence through smarter, safer gun laws and broader cultural change.

Come see our terrific slate of readers, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Po Murray

Po Murray is a co-founder and chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance (NAA), a national all-volunteer grassroots organization formed after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, working to bring about legislative and cultural changes to reduce all forms of gun deaths and injuries in America. Po and her family have lived in Sandy Hook for over 24 years and joined the gun violence prevention movement after her neighbor killed his mother then gunned down 20 children and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 

Antonius Wiriadjaja

Antonius Wiriadjaja is a multimedia artist based in New York City. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and currently teaches in the Art and Design department of Queens College. Also known as @foodmasku, his artwork has been showcased globally at events like Paris Photo Week, Miami Art Basel, the TED Conference, and the United Nations SDG Summit. A board member of Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence, he is dedicated to activism after surviving a shooting near his Brooklyn apartment in 2013, advocating fervently for gun violence prevention.

Lizzie Eaton

Lizzie Eaton is a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida where 17 people were killed. After the shooting, she became an advocate for gun violence prevention and was involved in the March For Our Lives movement. Through writing, she was able to express and work through her trauma while sharing her story of activism and mental health awareness with others. A recent graduate of Florida State University, Lizzie is currently residing in Atlanta, FL working as a Customer Experience Supervisor for UPS.

The Rally marches on! Join us for a night dedicated to reproductive justice with three literary luminaries—Megan Nolan, Alyssa Songsiridej, and Julie Orringer will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, March 7th! We’ll be raising money for Brigid Alliance, an organization that gets people to abortion care, whatever it takes.

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Megan Nolan

Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The White Review, The Sunday Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian and Frieze. Her debut novel Acts of Desperation was published in March 2021 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Little, Brown in the USA, and has been translated into thirteen languages. It was nominated for The Dylan Thomas Prize, The Sunday Times Young Writer of The Year, and the Betty Trask Award. Her second novel Ordinary Human Failings published in February 2023 and is nominated for The Gordon Burn Prize and the Nero Fiction Award. 

Alyssa Songsiridej

Alyssa Songsiridej is the author of Little Rabbit, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Edmund White Award. She is a 2022 5 under 35 National Book Foundation honoree, and has been supported by institutions such as the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and Lighthouse works. She lives in Philadelphia.

Julie Orringer

Julie Orringer is the author of three award-winning books: How to Breathe Underwater, The Invisible Bridge, and The Flight Portfolio, which was the basis for the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic.  She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and MacDowell. She teaches at New York University and Stanford University, and lives with her husband and children in Brooklyn, where she is at work on a new novel.

February 2024

The Rally marches on! We continue our new season with Alison Fairbrother, Joshua Furst, and Farah Barqawi taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, February 1st!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Alison Fairbrother

Alison Fairbrother is an associate editor at Riverhead Books. She worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., before getting her MFA at Stony Brook University. The Catch is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn.

Joshua Furst

Joshua Furst is the author of Revolutionaries, Short People and The Sabotage Café, as well as several plays that have been produced in New York, where for a number of years he taught in the public schools. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, the Chicago Tribune‘s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Ledig House. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Farah Barqawi

Farah Barqawi is a Palestinian author, performer, educator, and a feminist organizer. Her poetry and essays have appeared in multiple languages on online platforms and in multiple anthologies. In 2019, She produced and hosted a season of the Arabic podcast Eib (Shame). She wrote and performed her solo piece, “Baba, Come to Me”. She is the co-founder of two feminist projects: Wiki Gender and The Uprising of Women in the Arab World. She teaches Intro to Creative Writing for undergrads at New York University and is currently finishing her MFA in nonfiction creative writing, also from NYU, in Spring 2024.

December 2023

The Rally marches on! We continue our new season with Sarah Thankam Mathews, Julia May Jonas, and Kim Coleman Foote taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, December 7th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Sarah Thankam Mathews

Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, which was shortlisted for the Discover Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. Mathews' debut novel was also a New York Times Editor's Choice and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Slate, and Buzzfeed. Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen.

Julia May Jonas

Julia May Jonas is a writer of fiction and plays. Her first novel, Vladimir, was a New York Times Editor's Choice, named a best book of 2022 by New York Public Library, NPR, Time, Kirkus, The London Times and others, and has been translated into 14 languages. Her play Your Own Personal Exegesis premiered last winter at Lincoln Center, and her play Problems Between Sisters will premiere at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC this spring. She has taught at Skidmore College and NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Kim Coleman Foote

Kim Coleman Foote was born and raised in New Jersey, where she started writing fiction at the age of seven(ish). A recent fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has received additional fellowships from the NEA, NYFA, Bread Loaf, Phillips Exeter Academy, Center for Fiction, and Fulbright, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Missouri Review, The Literary Review, Kweli, and Obsidian. Coleman Hill is her first book.

November 2023

The Rally marches on! We continue our new season with Clifford Thompson, Anna Hogeland, and Amy Zhang taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, November 2nd!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Clifford Thompson
Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places, and his essay “La Bohème” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Thompson teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College and the Bennington Writing Seminars. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. He was born and raised in Washington, DC, attended Oberlin College, and lives with his wife in Brooklyn, where they raised their two kids.

Anna Hogeland
Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Big Issue, iNews, Gloss Magazine, and elsewhere. The Long Answer is her first novel and has been translated into seven languages. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Amy Zhang
Amy Zhang is a multidisciplinary storyteller, writer, and producer from Hong Kong, Beijing, and New York City. Previously, she was the non-fiction editor at Hyphen magazine and a segment producer for Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, where she produced episodes on topics from Chinese feminists to Indian cricket scandals. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Atlas Obscura, AFAR Magazine, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, and her story “Slow Clap” won Joyland Magazine’s Open Borders Fiction Prize in 2022, judged by Alexandra Kleeman. Amy has held fellowships and residencies at VONA, IFP, Theoria Foundation, and Periplus. She is currently a book editor and coach for Heidi Pitlor Editorial, a firm founded by the Best American Short Stories editor. Through Sandbox, an online community for Asian diasporic writers, she teaches writing and builds spaces for Asian writers to write from spaces of joy and belonging. Amy’s now back in New York City after a ten month trip abroad, where she completed a Huayu fellowship in Taiwan and traveled to 10 different cities, working on a book about pleasure, travel, and infrastructure.

October 2023

The Rally marches on! We continue our new season with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Lisa Hsiao Chen, and Rachel Cantor taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, October 5th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is the author of three novels, including Call Me Zebra, which won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" award. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Yale Review, The Sewanee Review, The Believer and The New York Times among other places. She is the 2023-2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fiction Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Lisa Hsiao Chen
Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of a book of poems, Mouth, (Kaya Press) and Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and Gotham Book Prize, a New York Times’ Editor’s Choice, and selected by The New Yorker, Vogue, and Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2022. Her work has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Art:Omi. Born in Taipei, she now lives in Brooklyn.

Rachel Cantor
Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels Half-Life of a Stolen Sister (Soho Press 2023), Good on Paper (Melville House 2016), and A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Melville House 2014). Two dozen of her stories have been published in the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She has written about fiction for National Public Radio, the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is writing a series of middle grade and young adult books set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

September 2023

The Rally marches on! We kick off our new season with Catherine Lacey, Jai Chakrabarti, and Christine Kandic Torres taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, September 7th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey is author of the novels Biography of X, Pew, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and The Answers, as well as the story collection Certain American States. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She was named one of Granta Magazine's Best Young American Novelists in 2017 and has recently published work in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and Esquire. Her books have been translated into numerous languages.

Jai Chakrabarti
Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, which won the National Jewish Book Award, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, which was a Good Housekeeping Book of the Month and was recommended by the New Yorker and the NYT. His short fiction has in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize.

Christine Kandic Torres
Christine Kandic Torres was born and raised in Queens, New York. Her debut novel, The Girls in Queens (HarperVia, 2022) was selected for the American Library Association’s 2023 Rise Feminist Booklist. Her Pushcart Prize-nominated short fiction has been published in outlets such as Catapult, Wigleaf, Kweli, and The Offing, and her non-fiction has appeared in Literary Hub and Electric Literature. A Hedgebrook and VONA alum, she is also the recipient of a Jerome Foundation emerging artist fellowship for fiction at the Anderson Center, and a New Work Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts.

June 2023

The Rally marches on with Adam Dalva, Nancy Stohlman, and Colin Dickey taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, June 1st!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Adam Dalva
Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic. He is the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica Magazine. Adam serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, is the Books Editor of Words Without Borders, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.

Nancy Stohlman
Nancy Stohlman is the author of six books including After the Rapture (2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (2020), winner of the 2021 Reader Views Gold Award and re-released in 2022 as an audiobook. Her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and holds workshops and retreats around the world. Find out more at http://www.nancystohlman.com

Colin Dickey
Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places; The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained; and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (July 2023).

May 2023

The Rally marches on with Patricia Park, Anna Kushner, and Danielle Cowan taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, May 4th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Patricia Park
Patricia Park, the award-winning author of RE JANE (a retelling of Jane Eyre), makes her young adult debut in IMPOSTER SYNDROME & OTHER CONFESSIONS OF ALEJANDRA KIM, a funny and poignant YA about a multicultural teen from Queens navigating college apps, performative wokeness, identity politics, and grief. A former Fulbright scholar, Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence, and Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, she has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, and others. She is a professor of creative writing in American University’s MFA Program. A Queens native, she lives in Brooklyn. www.patriciapark.com  Instagram/Twitter/TikTok: @patriciapark718 

Anna Kushner
The daughter of Cuban exiles, Anna Kushner has published her poetry, essays, fiction, and creative nonfiction in Asymptote, The Acentos Review, Newtown Literary, Talkspace, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She has translated the novels of Norberto Fuentes, Marcial Gala, Leonardo Padura, Guillermo Rosales, and Gonçalo M. Tavares, as well as two collections of non-fiction by Mario Vargas Llosa. Her translation of Marcial Gala’s “Call Me Cassandra” was a Finalist for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize and for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. 

Danielle Cowan
Danielle Cowan is a blind, queer and Blackarican native New Yorker dabbling in organizing, performance and poetry. Her art comes from fascination with A body or place to hold multiple sometimes conflicting identities and playing with ways to write within shared histories and trauma. Her work has been published in Causeway Lit’s Revolution Issue, Mobius: the Journal of Social Change and elsewhere. She was an artistic investigator for Rattlestick Playwrights Theater’s Block by Block Project, was a spring 2022 Office Hours Poetry Workshop fellow and is currently a 2023 More Art Engaging Artist fellow.

April 2023

The Rally marches on with Chantal V. Johnson, Hugh Ryan, and Benedict Nguyễn taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, April 6th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Chantal V. Johnson
Chantal V. Johnson is a lawyer and writer without an MFA. Her debut novel, Post-Traumatic, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A graduate of Stanford Law School, she lives in New York.

Hugh Ryan
Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator, and most recently, the author of The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which New York Magazine called one of the best books of 2022. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors' Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association. Since 2019, he has worked with the NYC Dept. of Education to develop LGBTQ+ inclusive educational materials and trainings.

Benedict Nguyễn
benedict nguyễn is a dancer, writer, and creative producer based on unceded Lenapehoking and Wappinger lands (South Bronx, New York). Her criticism has appeared in Into, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, Vanity Fair, and AAWW’s The Margins, among other outlets. Recent projects include their curatorial platform "soft bodies in hard places," the newsletter “first quarter moon slush, ”#bennyboosbookclub, and the zine nasty notes, which she published in 2022. When not online @xbennyboo, she’s working on a few novels. benedict-nguyen.com.

March 2023

The Rally marches on with a very special show in support of the Iranian uprising! On March 2nd, 2022, at 7:00 p.m., we continue our new season with three incredible Iranian-American writers—Negin Farsad, Neda Toloui-Semnani, and Nilo Tabrizy who will taking the Pete's Candy Store stage!

Come out to support the brave protesters, see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series! For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Negin Farsad
Negin Farsad is a TEDFellow and gave a TEDTalk on social justice comedy seen by millions. She is a regular on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk. She is author of the Thurber Prize-nominated How to Make White People Laugh and host of the podcast Fake the Nation. You can see her on HBO’s High Maintenance, Hulu’s Not Okay, Hillary Clinton’s AppleTV+ show Gutsy, and starring on HBOMax’s Birdgirl. Farsad has written for the Guardian, Oprah Magazine, and the New York Times. She once sued the MTA for the right to put up funny posters about Muslims, and won.

Neda Toloui-Semnani
Neda Toloui-Semnani is an Emmy award-winning producer, reporter, and author. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including This American Life, The Cut, VICE News, and The Washington Post among others. Her first book, They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents, was published in 2022.

Nilo Tabrizy
Nilo Tabrizy is a journalist and writer based in New York. She’s currently a reporter on the Visual Forensics team at the Washington Post where she focuses on open source investigative reporting. As well, she is co-writing a book about the protests in Iran with a journalist and close friend of hers who is still based in Tehran. Previously, Nilo was a video journalist at The New York Times where she reported on Iran, race and policing, and abortion access. In her spare time, she dabbles in Persian calligraphy and directs music videos.

February 2023

The Rally continues our season with Hyeseung Song, Giada Scodellaro, and Hannah Bae taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, February 2nd!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Hyeseung Song
Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean-American painter and author of a debut memoir (forthcoming from Simon & Schuster). In both her visual art and writing, she explores issues of creativity, the life of the artist and the model minority myth. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Giada Scodellaro
Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, BOMB, Harper’s, Astra, and Granta, among other publications. Giada's debut collection, Some of Them Will Carry Me, was recently published by Dorothy, a publishing project.

Hannah Bae
Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about family estrangement and mental illness. She is the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and she was a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. She has been hired to teach creative writing for the Indiana University Writers Conference, Kundiman, Kweli International Literary Festival and The Resort LIC.

January 2023

The Rally continues our season with Alejandro Varela, Maija Makinen, and Hannah Bae taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, January 5th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Alejandro Varela
Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His debut novel, The Town of Babylon (2022), was published by Astra House and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His story collection, The People Who Report More Stress (Astra, 2023), is forthcoming. Varela’s work has appeared in the Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, and the Offing, among others outlets. He is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal. His graduate studies were in public health.

Maija Makinen
Maija Mäkinen is the author of The Ghosts of Other Immigrants, her debut story collection forthcoming in 2023 from New American Press. Her work has been featured in The Iowa Review, Porter House Review, The Bare Life Review and internationally. She has received residency fellowships from Art Omi, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, The Studios of Key West and the Kone Foundation Saari Residency in Finland. She is the winner of the Iowa Review Award in Fiction and the University of Cambridge Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, and received an honorary mention in the 2022 Best American Short Stories. She's worked as forensics lab dishwasher, candy factory machine operator, copyeditor, camera operator, conference organizer, advocate for the homeless, etc., and, after seven transatlantic moves between Finland and America, lives in Brooklyn and writes mainly in English.

Arden Levine
Arden Levine’s debut chapbook, Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021), was included in CLMP's 2022 Reading List for Women’s History Month. Her poems and other writing have appeared in American Life in Poetry (selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser), Barrow Street, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review’s Poem-of-the-Week, Poetry Society of America’s Song Cycle series, and WNYC’s Radiolab. A National Book Critics Circle member, Arden writes reviews of poetry collections that examine topics in contemporary U.S. public policy. Arden is an NYC municipal employee whose daily work focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development. (More at: www.ardenlevine.com)

December 2022

The Rally continues our season with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Hugh Ryan, and Elissa Bassist taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, December 1st!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the novel Big Girl, The Poetics of Difference, and Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith A. Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. Sullivan is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. A native of Harlem, she lives in Washington, DC. 

Hugh Ryan
Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator, and most recently, the author of The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which New York Magazine called one of the best books of 2022. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors' Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association. Since 2019, he has worked with the NYC Dept. of Education to develop LGBTQ+ inclusive educational materials and trainings.

Elissa Bassist
Elissa Bassist is the editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus and the author of the award-deserving memoir Hysterical. As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, she’s written cultural and personal criticism since the website launched in 2009. She teaches humor writing at The New School, Catapult, 92NY, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and she is probably her therapist’s favorite.

November 2022

The Rally continues our new season with Cynthia Manick, Albert Samaha, and Janelle Greco taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, November 3rd!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Cynthia Manick
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, forthcoming 2023), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, 2021), and author of  Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among others.  Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, Manick is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue; and her poem "Things I Carry Into the World" was made into a film by Motionpoems, an organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. A storyteller and performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and most recently the Brooklyn and Frye museum’s, Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently serves on the  board of  the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books. 

Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist at BuzzFeed News and author of two books. His latest book, Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes, was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and received a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant. His first book, Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City, was winner of the New York Society Library’s 2019 Hornblower Award, a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award, and adapted into the Netflix docuseries We Are: The Brooklyn Saints.

His story on a narcotics unit in Mississippi led to a police captain’s resignation in 2015, his story on a Bronx murder helped get a wrongfully convicted man freed from prison in 2017, his 2018 story on a teenager who accused two NYPD detectives of rape led Congress and six states to pass bills strengthening police sexual misconduct laws, and his 2020 reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic forced more than a dozen companies to implement additional safety protocols for food and service workers. His story on why Filipinos turned to an authoritarian president was selected into The Best American Travel Writing 2018. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and The Trace, and he has performed on the Pop-Up Magazine live storytelling tour. He lives in Brooklyn. 

Janelle Greco
Janelle Greco is a writer and training director living in Brooklyn. She is grateful for her varied work experience, which has led her to Youth Communication, an organization dedicated to amplifying true stories of youth of color. Janelle's stories focus mostly on family, mental health, and growing up on Long Island, and her work has previously appeared in The Sun, Hobart, Maudlin House, and Pigeon Pages. She also currently works with PEN America as a fiction judge for the PEN Prison Writing Contest.

October 2022

The Rally continues our new season with Carina del Valle Schorske, Sidik Fofana, and Meher Manda taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, October 6th!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Carina del Valle Schorske
Carina del Valle Schorske is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a translator of Puerto Rican poetry. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, was honored with a Whiting Nonfiction Grant and is forthcoming from Riverhead Books

Sidik Fofana
Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He was also named a fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection composed of eight narratives about residents of a fictional building in Harlem, was published by Scribner in August 2022.

Meher Manda
Meher Manda is a poet, short story writer, journalist, and educator originally from Mumbai, India, currently splitting time between Providence, RI and New York City. She earned her MFA in fiction from the College of New Rochelle where she was the founding editor-in-chief of The Canopy Review. She is the author of the chapbook Busted Models (No, Dear / Small Anchor, 2019), and her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Margins, Barren Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Sporklet, Hobart Pulp, Peach Mag, Catapult, Epiphany, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. She was a fellow of the Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium at DreamYard and a Best New Poets and Best of the Net Anthology nominee. She co-creates the political graphic novel Jamun Ka Ped.

September 2022

The Rally kicks off our new season with Megan Culhane Galbraith, Jeanna Kadlec, Ruth Mukwana taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, September 1st!

Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Megan Culhane Galbraith
Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer, visual artist, and adoptee. Her debut memoir-in-essays is The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child's Memory Book (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press, 2021.) Megan's work was listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and 2017 and she was recognized by Poets & Writers in their "5 Over 50" issue. She is the 2022 Writer-in-Residence at Adoptees ON. Her essays, interviews, reviews, and visual art have appeared in BOMB, The Believer, HYPERALLERGIC!, ZZYZYVA, Tupelo Quarterly, Hobart, Redivider, Longreads, Hotel Amerika, and Catapult, among others. She is the founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute and an alumna and the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. www.megangalbraith.com

Jeanna Kadlec
Jeanna Kadlec is the author of Heretic: A Memoir (forthcoming from HarperCollins, October 2022). She's a writer, astrologer, former lingerie boutique owner, and recovering academic. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, NYLON, O the Oprah Magazine, Allure, Catapult, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and more. A born and bred Midwesterner, she now lives in Brooklyn.

Ruth Mukwana
RUTH MUKWANA is a fiction writer from Uganda. She is also an aid worker currently working for the United Nations in New York. She’s a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA), a 2022 Bennington Fellow and a 2020 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil NYC Emerging Fellow. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines including Solstice, Consequence, and Black Warriors Review (BWR where her story, “Taboo” was a runner-up in the BWR 2017 fiction contest. She lives with her daughter in New York and co-produces a podcast, Stories and Humanitarian Action SAHA) that investigates how storytelling can raise awareness and galvanize action to address the causes and consequences of humanitarian crises.

June 2022

The Rally continues!! Khadijah Queen, Alison Espach, Shelly Oria, and Maud Newton will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, June 2nd!

We continue our live and in-person series with three literary luminaries! Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The show will raise money for The Brigid Alliance, which arranges and funds confidential, personalized travel support to those seeking abortion care in increasingly hostile environments. The Rally is the heart of a march in the body of a reading series.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Khadijah Queen
Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.” Individual works appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Offing, Harper’s Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from University of Denver.

Alison Espach
Alison Espach is the author of the novels Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, an Indie Next Pick and Amazon Editors’ Pick for 2022, and The Adults, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Barnes and Noble Discover pick. Her short story series In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People is an Audible Original. She has written for McSweeney’s, Vogue, Outside Magazine, Joyland, Glamour, Salon, and other places. She teaches creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.

Shelly Oria
Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus, Writings from the MeToo Movement (McSweeney's 2019), as well as the forthcoming I Know What's Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom (McSweeney's 2022). Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and on Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, received a number of awards, and been translated to several languages.

Maud Newton
Maud Newton is a writer and critic. Her first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House, April 2022), has been called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe, and was a selection for Roxane Gay's The Audacious Book Club. Maud has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Oxford American, and more. She grew up in Miami and has degrees in English and law

May 2022

The Rally is BACK!! Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Jung Yun, and Edie Meidav will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, May 5th!

We continue live and in-person with three literary luminaries! Come see our slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The heart of a march in the body of a reading series.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the novel The Evening Hero (May 2022), forthcoming with Simon & Schuster and the re-release of her young adult novel, Finding My Voice. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and many others. She is a founder for former board president of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction at Columbia, where she is the Writer in Residence. She has appeared on CNN discussing both North Korean diplomacy and medical cannabis.

Edie Meidav
Called "an American original", Edie Meidav is the author of the lyric novel ANOTHER LOVE DISCOURSE (May 2022, Penguin/Terra Nova/MIT Press), KINGDOM OF THE YOUNG, a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda, as well as earlier novels LOLA,CALIFORNIA (FSG); CRAWL SPACE (FSG); THE FAR FIELD: A NOVEL OF CEYLON (Houghton). Her work has been recognized with the Bard Fiction Prize, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel, and year-end editors' picks, as well as support from Art OMI, the Fulbright Program (Sri Lanka and Cyprus), the Howard Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and more. She is a senior editor at the journal Conjunctions and a professor in the UMass Amherst MFA program, where she founded and advises the Radius MFA project. Born in Canada, raised by California and abroad, she has served as a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, the Juniper Prize, Howard, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and elsewhere.

Jung Yun
Jung Yun was born in Seoul, South Korea and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. She is the author of two novels—O BEAUTIFUL (St. Martin’s Press, 2021) and SHELTER (Picador 2016), the latter of which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Her work has appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Indiana Review, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Currently, she lives in Baltimore and serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the George Washington University.

December 2021

The Rally is BACK!! James Hannaham, Anna Moschovakis, and David Wright will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, December 2nd!

We return live and in-person with three literary luminaries! Come see our slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The heart of a march in the body of a reading series—a whole new helping of overtly political literature. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. *proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

James Hannaham
James Hannaham was born in the Bronx, grew up in Yonkers, New York, and now lives in Brooklyn. His most recent novel, Delicious Foods, won the PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. His novel God Says No was honored by the ALA's Stonewall Book Awards. His short stories have been in One Story, Fence, Story Quarterly, BOMB; he was for many years a writer for the Village Voice and Salon and is also a visual and performance artist. He has exhibited text-based visual art at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, 490 Atlantic, and James Cohan. He won Best in Show for the exhibition Biblio Spectaculum at Main Street Arts. He teaches at the Pratt Institute.

Anna Moschovakis
Anna Moschovakis's recent books are the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love and the English translation of David Diop's At Night All Blood Is Black (Frêre d'âme); an excerpt from her long poem "Preliminary Notes on Risk" was Folder magazine's July 2021 selection. She's a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a co-founder of Bushel Collective, an art and community space in Delhi, NY. Her next book, Participation, is forthcoming next year.

David Wright Faladé
David Wright Faladé is a professor at the University of Illinois and the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the author of the young adult novel Away Running and of the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, which was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. The recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, he has written for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Southern Review, Newsday, and more.

November 2021

The Rally is BACK!! Fiona Maazel, Yesica Balderrama, and Emily Hunt Kivel will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, November 4th!

We return live and in-person with three literary luminaries! Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The heart of a march in the body of a reading series—a whole new helping of overtly political literature. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. *proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Fiona Maazel
Fiona Maazel is the author of the novels A Little More Human, Woke Up Lonely, and Last Last Chance. She is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the Bard Prize for Fiction, and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, which feels way less potent now that she is 44. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2017, Book Forum, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Salon, Selected Shorts, This American Life, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is the Director of Communications for Measures for Justice, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Yesica Balderrama
Yesica Balderrama is a producer and writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on WNYC, NPR, PEN America, Guernica, and others.

Emily Hunt Kivel
Emily Hunt Kivel was born in San Francisco. Her fiction appears in the Paris Review, the New England Review, Fieldnotes, Guernica, the Southwest Review, Volume I Brooklyn, and others. Her translation work can be found in World Literature Today. She is the author of the poetry chapbook John Travolta Considers His Odds (2016, Whitehorse & Slaughter) and is completing her first novel. She has taught creative writing and composition at St. Edward’s University and Columbia University, where she was awarded the De Alba fellowship in fiction as well as a UWP Fellowship for teaching.

October 2021

The Rally is BACK!! Phil Klay, Zaina Arafat, and Pitchaya Sudbanthad will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, October 7th!

We return live and in-person with three literary luminaries! Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The heart of a march in the body of a reading series—a whole new helping of overtly political literature. For more on this event, please visit www.rallyreadingseries.com.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

*proof of vaccination required, via photo or NYS Excelsior app*

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Phil Klay
Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which received the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and the novel Missionaries, named as one of the best books of the year by both the Wall Street Journal and by Barack Obama. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University.

Zaina Arafat
Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American author. Her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, VICE, BuzzFeed, Granta, Guernica, The Believer, Harper’s Bazaar and Virginia Quarterly Review. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. In recognition of her work, Zaina was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She is currently at work on an essay collection.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad
Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of the novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain, first published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK) and selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as Finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. 

He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and MacDowell, and currently splits time between Bangkok and Brooklyn.

September 2021

The Rally is BACK!! Lisa Ko, Bridgett M. Davis, and Bethany Ball will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, September 2nd!

We’re kicking off our new season with three literary luminaries. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The heart of a march in the body of a reading series—a whole new helping of overtly political literature. For more on this event, please visit 

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Lisa Ko
Lisa Ko’s first novel, The Leavers, was a national best-seller that won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction in The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

Bridgett M. Davis
Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, and named a Best Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, NBC News and Parade Magazine. She is currently writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of the book, which will be produced by Plan B Entertainment and released by Searchlight Pictures.

She is also the author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral, as well as writer/director of the award-winning feature film Naked Acts. As a Professor at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, she teaches creative, narrative and film writing. Until recently, she curated Words@Weeksville, a reading series in central Brooklyn.

Davis’ essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Real Simple, the LA Times and O, The Oprah Magazine. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she lives in Brooklyn with her family. Visit her website at www.bridgettdavis.com

Bethany Ball
Bethany Ball lives in New York. Her recent book, What to Do About the Solomons, was released in April 2017 from Grove Atlantic. Her forthcoming title The Pessimists, will be released from Grove Atlantic in October 2021.

Denne Michele Norris
Denne Michele Norris is a Black Trans writer living in NYC. She is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, and her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and is hard at work on her debut novel. Follow her on Twitter and IG @thedennemichele.

October 2020

Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, and Lidia Yuknavitch will be taking the stage—virtually—on Thursday, October 15th!

The Rally, with our friends at The Rumpus, continue our exciting new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Tune in to see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

FRANNY CHOI
FRANNY CHOI is a writer of poems, essays, and plays. She is the author of two poetry collections, SOFT SCIENCE (Alice James Books) and FLOATING, BRILLIANT, GONE (Write Bloody Publishing), as well as a chapbook, DEATH BY SEX MACHINE (Sibling Rivalry Press). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, and a graduate of the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers Program. A former news editor at Hyphen Magazine, she co-hosts the podcast VS alongside fellow Dark Noise Collective member Danez Smith. She is a current Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in English at Williams College.

NATE MARSHALL
NATE MARSHALL is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor from the South Side of Chicago. He is the author and editor of numerous works including FINNA, WILD HUNDREDS, THE BREAKBEAT POETS: NEW AMERICAN POETRY IN THE AGE OF HIP-HOP, and the audio drama BRUH RABBIT & THE FANTASTIC TELLING OF REMINGTON ELLIS ESQ. He is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. He has bars.

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the National Bestselling author of the novels THE BOOK OF JOAN and THE SMALL BACKS OF CHILDREN, the novel DORA: A HEADCASE, and a critical book on war and narrative, ALLEGORIES OF VIOLENCE. Her widely acclaimed memoir THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. THE MISFIT'S MANIFESTO, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books. Her new collection of fiction, VERGE, was published by Riverhead Books in winter 2020. Yuknavitch founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregone. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

June 2020

The Rally Reading Series and Words Without Borders invite you to a multilingual reading of queer writing from around the world, which will launch WWB’s eleventh annual Queer issue. Our exciting lineup includes Turkish writer Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu; Filipino writer R. Joseph Dazo and translator John Bengan; Italian poet Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto and translator Danielle Pieratti; and Jeffrey Angles, reading his translations of Japanese poet Mutsuo Takahashi’s work.

The readings will be followed by a Q&A. This virtual event is free, but we will also be raising funds for Shade Literary Arts’ Queer Writers of Color Relief Fund (https://bit.ly/2Mx2yUW)—donations are welcome upon registering and during the event. Tune in to see our terrific slate of readers and join the conversation with your own questions!

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT REQUIRES ADVANCE REGISTRATION:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rally-reading-series-words-without-borders-international-queer-writing-tickets-107596592304

Upon registering, you will be signed up to receive the Zoom link thirty minutes prior to the event’s start time.

Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu

Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu is a Turkish author, now full-time resident in Georgia, who recently escaped political, cultural, and gender oppression in Turkey. She helped create the #MeToo movement within the Turkish publishing industry, from which she was then excommunicated. With an MA in Turkish language and literature from Bogazici University, Karabıyıkoğlu has published five books in Turkish and has recently completed translations of three new books for international publication. Having won six literary awards in her country, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 2019 and won the UnCollected Press/Raw Art Review Full Length Book of Short Stories Prize for her book "Subdermal Sky." Find her @Nkarabiyikoglu and at www.nazlikarabiyikoglu.com

R. Joseph Dazo

R. Joseph Dazo teaches literature and creative writing to high school seniors at a public school in the City of Naga. He holds an MA in literature. He is also the author of a collection of gay short fiction in the Binisaya language, "Ubang Gabii sa Mango Avenue" (Kasingkasing Press, 2019), and co-editor of an anthology of queer literature in Binisaya, "Libulan Binisayang Antolohiya sa Katitikang Queer" (Cratos, 2018). He won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for his short fiction. He is the founding editor of "Katitikan: Literary Journal of the Philippine South" (www.katitikan.com). He lives in the City of Talisay, Cebu.

John Bengan

John Bengan teaches in the Department of Humanities at the University of the Philippines Mindanao. His work has appeared in "Likhaan 6," "Kritika Kultura," BooksActually’s "Gold Standard," and "Cha: An Asian Literary Journal," among others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. A recipient of a Ford Foundation International Fellowship, he has won a Philippines Free Press Literary Award and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for his short fiction. He lives in Davao City.

Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto

Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto was born in Sicily in 1994. She currently lives in Rome, where she graduated from Sapienza University with a degree in modern philology. "Dolore Minimo" (Minimal Pain), published in 2018, is her first book, and the first collection of Italian poetry to address the subject of transsexuality. With an introduction by Dacia Maraini and an afterword by Alessandro Fo, the book was featured in Italy’s major newspapers and won several prizes, including the Viareggio Opera Prima in 2019 for best debut. In February 2020, BUR Rizzoli published Giovanna’s second book of poems, "Dove non siamo stati" (Where We Have Not Been).

Danielle Pieratti

Danielle Pieratti’s poems and translations have appeared in the "Paris Review," "Boston Review," "Sixth Finch," "New Poetry in Translation," and other journals. Her first book, "Fugitives" (2016, Lost Horse Press), was selected by Kim Addonizio for the 2016 Idaho Prize and won the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for poetry. She is the author of two chapbooks: "By the Dog Star," 2005 winner of the Edda Chapbook Competition for Women (Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press), and "The Post, the Cage, the Palisade," published by Dancing Girl Press in 2015. She lives in Connecticut.

Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. His collection of poetry "Watashi no hizuke henkōsen" (My International Date Line), which he wrote in Japanese, won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, making him the first non-native speaker ever to win this award, comparable to the Pulitzer in the United States. In addition, he has published dozens of translations of Japan's most important modern authors and poets, earning numerous prizes for his translation work. He believes strongly in the role of translators as activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation into English of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers.

Mutsuo Takahashi

Jeffrey Angles will be reading his translations of work by Mutsuo Takahashi, one of Japan's most prominent living poets, who has won almost every major poetry prize in the nation. Since first attracting the attention of the literary world in the 1960s with his bold poetic evocations of homoerotic desire, Takahashi has published dozens of books of poetry and many volumes of essays and literary criticism. His works available in English include the memoir "Twelve Views from the Distance" (University of Minnesota Press), translated by Jeffrey Angles.

May 2020

Sari Botton, James Arthur, and Laura Read will be taking the stage—virtually—on Thursday, May 7th!

The Rally continues its exciting new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Tune in to see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Sari Botton

Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. She is the Essays Editor for Longeads, and edited the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY and its New York Times bestselling follow-up, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY. She teaches at Catapult and in the MFA program at Bay Path University.

James Arthur

James Arthur was born in Connecticut and grew up in Canada. He is the author of the poetry collection The Suicide's Son (Véhicule Press 2019) and Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press 2012). Arthur's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a visiting fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University. 

Laura Read

Laura Read is the author of Dresses from the Old Country (BOA, 2018), Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (Floating Bridge Press, 2011). She served as poet laureate for Spokane, Washington from 2015-17 and teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.

March 2020

Julia Phillips, Rebecca Carroll, and Caits Meissner will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, March 5th!

The Rally continues its exciting new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

​​Julia Phillips
​​Julia Phillips is the debut author of the nationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth, which is being published in twenty-two languages and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A Fulbright fellow, Julia has written for The New York Times, ​The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She lives in Brooklyn.

Rebecca Carroll
Rebecca Carroll is a cultural critic at WNYC and host of the forthcoming podcast from WNYC Studios, Come Through with Rebecca Carroll, 15 essential conversations about race and identity with a broad range of artists, creatives and public figures, launching in March. Rebecca is also a writer, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New York and The Atlantic, and the author of several books, including Surviving the White Gaze: A Coming of Age Memoir, due out from Simon & Schuster in February 2021.

Caits Meissner
Caits Meissner is the author of the illustrated hybrid poetry book Let It Die Hungry (The Operating System, 2016). Her latest projects are a DIY comix zine zine Pep Talks For Broke(n) People, and New York Strange, a comix series publishing monthly on Hobart literary journal‘s website. Currently, Caits is the inaugural Palette Poetry Second Book Fellow and spends her days as PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program Director.

February 2020

Wayétu Moore, Siddhartha Deb, and Siobhan Adock will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, February 6th!

The Rally continues its exciting new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Wayétu Moore

Wayétu Moore is the author of She Would Be King. Her memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women will also be released by Graywolf on June 2, 2020. She Would Be King was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. Moore is the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit organization that creates and distributes culturally relevant books for underrepresented readers. Her first bookstore opened in Monrovia, Liberia in 2015. Her writing can be found in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Guernica, The Atlantic Magazine and other publications.  She has been featured in The Economist Magazine, NPR, NBC, BET and ABC, among others, for her work in advocacy for diversity in children’s literature.

Siddhartha Deb

Born in north-eastern India, Siddhartha Deb is the author of The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, a narrative nonfiction book that was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK, winner of the PEN Open award in the United States, and published without its first chapter in India because of a court order. A columnist for The Baffler, The New York Times Book Review, and a contributing editor to The New Republic, Deb’s journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, n+1, The Nation, Dissent, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors in the UK and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies and the Howard Foundation at Brown University. 

Siobhan Adock

Siobhan Adcock is the author of two novels, The Completionist (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Barter (Dutton, 2014), and her short fiction, essays, and humor writing appear in Salon, Slate, Ms. Magazine, McSweeney's, The Millions, Triquarterly, and others. She has led writing classes and workshops at the Sackett Writers Workshop, the Gotham Writers Workshop, Cornell University, the Auburn Federal Correctional Facility, and the nonprofit organization Voices from War, serving veterans and service members' families.

The Rumpus and The Rally Reading Series are proud to announce this co-hosted event, featuring readings from Jennifer Baker, Leland Cheuk, and Donika Kelly! A moderated 15-minute Q&A will follow the reading. This event is free and open to the public.

The Rally is a monthly reading series that takes place at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The themes and the topics addressed vary greatly from show to show, but the central mission remains the same: to provide a platform for underrepresented or disenfranchised individuals whose voices are luminous and necessary. In those stories we hope to find actionable, meaningful ways to cultivate change, and advance a stronger future for our community and democracy.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Learn more about our awesome lineup:

DONIKA KELLY

DONIKA KELLY is the author of the chapbook AVIARIUM (fivehundred places) and the full-length collection BESTIARY (Graywolf). Bestiary is the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also long listed for the National Book Award, and a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a member of Poets at the End of the World, a poetry collective dedicated to service and social justice and works as an Assistant Professor at Baruch College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review.

LELAND CHEUK

LELAND CHEUK is the author of three books of fiction, including the novels THE MISADVENTURES OF SULLIVER PONG and most recently, NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN. His work has appeared in Salon, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. He has been awarded fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden Castle, Djerassi, and elsewhere. He runs the indie press 7.13 Books and lives in Brooklyn. You can follow him on Twitter @lcheuk and at lelandcheuk.com.

JENNIFER BAKER

JENNIFER BAKER is a publishing professional, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, and contributing editor to Electric Literature. In 2017, she received a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship & a Queens Council on the Arts New Work Grant for Nonfiction Literature. Her essay "What We Aren't (or the Ongoing Divide)" was listed as a Notable Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018. Jennifer is also the editor of the all PoC-short story anthology EVERYDAY PEOPLE: THE COLOR OF LIFE (Atria Books, 2018). Her writing has appeared in various print and online publications. Her website is: jennifernbaker.com.

October 2019

Helen Phillips, Naima Coster, and Rachel Lyon will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, October 3rd!

The Rally continues its exciting new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips is the author of five books, including, most recently, the novel The Need, for which she was recently long-listed for the National Book Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.

Naima Coster

Naima Coster is the author of Didn't Never Know, a novel forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing. Her debut, Halsey Street, is a novel of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Halsey Street has been recommended as a must-read by People, Essence, Bustle, Electric Lit, BitchMedia, The Root, Well-Read Black Girl and The Skimm, among others. It was a Finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Naima has taught writing to students in jail, youth programs, and universities. She is currently visiting faculty at the MFA programs at City College in Harlem and Antioch University in L.A. Naima tweets as @zafatista and writes the newsletter, Bloom How You Must.

Rachel Lyon

RACHEL LYON is the author of the novel SELF PORTRAIT WITH BOY, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction's 2018 First Novel Prize and is in feature film development at Topic Studios. Her short work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Longreads, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is Editor-in-Chief of Epiphany and cofounder of the reading series Ditmas Lit, in her hometown, Brooklyn NY.

September 2019

In collaboration with PEN America and The Poetry Project, Garrard Conley and Michelle García will take the stage at Pete’s Candy Store on September 5th, 2019, at 7:00 p.m. We’ll also be featuring the work of currently incarcerated poet Eduardo (Echo) Martinez.

The Rally kicks off its third season in commemoration of the Attica Riots. Presented with PEN America and The Poetry Project, these leading literary warriors of the resistance will help highlight the work of incarcerated writers. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

PEN America is a literary arts organization that works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature. The Poetry Project promotes, fosters and inspires the reading and writing of contemporary poetry.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Garrard Conley

Garrard Conley is the author of the New York Times Best Selling memoir Boy Erased (Penguin 2016), now a major motion picture and translated in over a dozen languages. Conley is also a producer and creator of the podcast UnErased, which explores the history of conversion therapy in America. His work can be found in The New York Times, TIME, VICE, CNN, BuzzFeed, Them, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Huffington Post, among other places, and he is currently at work on a novel (Penguin 2021) about queer 18th century lives.

Michelle García

Michelle García is a journalist and essayist. She is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations and she recently concluded the Dobie Paisano fellowship through The University ofTexas and the Texas Institute letters, which had her ensconced on a Texas ranch, roaming the brush, avoiding snakes and listening to lions roar. She recently created and edited the Rewriting the West series, published by Guernica magazine. She divides her time between NYC and her home state of Texas. She can be reached at: mg@michellegarciainc.com or found at @pistoleraprod.

Eduardo (Echo) Martinez

Eduardo (Echo) Martinez has been telling tall tales since he was little. He is a Native Floridian who is currently serving a life sentence and has been incarcerated for over 19 years. Eduardo has been published in Cuban Counterpoints, Scalawag, The Don’t Shake the Spoon: A Literary Journal, the Miami Herald, Anthology Bckinder, and PBS N.Y.. He can be heard online.

June 2019

Helen Phillips, Sandra Newman, and Hafizah Geter will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, June 6th!

The Rally continues its new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips’s fifth book, The Need, is forthcoming in July 2019. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a Notable Book by the Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.

Sandra Newman

Sandra Newman's new novel The Heavens will come out from Grove Atlantic in 2019. Her previous novels are The Country of Ice Cream Star, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, andCake. She's also the author of four works of nonfiction, including How Not to Write a Novel (with Howard Mittelmark).

Hafizah Geter

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter is a Cave Canem Fellow and was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discovery” / Boston Review Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and West Branch, among others. She was a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship Finalist from the Poetry Foundation and a finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Patrick Rosal.

May 2019

Naomi Jackson, Ashley C. Ford, and Abeer Y. Hoque will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, May 2nd!

The Rally continues its new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Naomi Jackson

Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, a novel published by Penguin Press in June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Star Side was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.  Star Side is the winner of Late Night Library's 2016 Debut-litzer Prize. First Lady of New York City Chirlane McCray selected the novel for the City's 2016 Gracie Book Club. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side “a gem of a book.” Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents.

Ashley C. Ford

Ashley C. Ford lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana. She is currently writing her memoir, Somebody's Daughter, which will be published by Flatiron Books under the imprint An Oprah Book. Ford hosts PROFILE by BuzzFeed News, and is the former host of Brooklyn-based news & culture TV show (and podcast!), 112BK. She also works on a collection of music-focused interviews (B-Side Chats) with her husband, Kelly Stacy. Ford has written or guest-edited for The Guardian, ELLE, BuzzFeed, OUT Magazine, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, Lenny Letter, INTO and various other web and print publications. She has been named among Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 in Media (2017), Brooklyn Magazine's Brooklyn 100 (2016), and Time Out New York's New Yorkers of The Year (2017).

Abeer Y. Hoque

Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. Her books include a travel photography monograph, The Long Way Home (2013), a linked story collection, The Lovers and the Leavers (2015), and a memoir, Olive Witch (2017). She has won fellowships from Fulbright, NEA, and NYFA, and her work has been published in Guernica, the Rumpus, Elle, Catapult, ZYZZYVA, and the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, among others. She has BS and MA degrees from the Wharton School, an MFA from the University of San Francisco, and she has held two solo photography exhibitions. See more at olivewitch.com.

April 2019

Molly Crabapple, Dale Peck, and Meera Nair will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, April 4th!

The Rally continues its new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, (with Marwan Hisham). Her reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Yale Poynter Fellowship, a Front Page Award, was shortlisted for a Frontline Print Journalism Award and longlisted for the National Book Award. She is often asked to discuss her work chronicling the conflicts of the 21st Century, and has appeared on All In with Chris Hayes, Amanpour, NPR, BBC News, and more. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress and the New York Historical Society. She is currently the Spring 2019 artist in residence at NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Dale Peck

Dale Peck is the author of thirteen books in a variety of genres, including Visions and Revisions, Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout. His fiction and criticism have appeared in more than fifty publications, and have earned him two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He lives in New York City, where he has taught in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program since 1999. His fourteenth book, the story collection What Burns, will be published by Soho Press in November of this year.

Meera Nair

Meera Nair is the author of Video (NY:Pantheon) and two children's books Maya saves the Day and Maya in a Mess published by Duckbill Books. Video won the Sixth Annual Asian-American Literary Award and was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Her essays and stories have appeared in Guernica, the New York Times, the Guardian and NPR's Selected Shorts among others and in several anthologies, including most recently, Fierce: Essays By and About Dauntless Women (Nauset Press, 2018). Meera has won Residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and writing fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the New York Times, and the Queens Council for the Arts. She was the Writer-in-Residence at Fordham and teaches writing at NYU. She is a co-founder of the reading series, Queens Writers Resist. Follow her on Twitter @MeeraNairNY

March 2019

Hillary Jordan, Helen Benedict, and Lynn Steger Strong will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, March 7th!

The Rally continues its new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Hillary Jordan

Hillary Jordan is the author of the Mudbound and When She Woke, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The two novels have been translated into fifteen languages. Mudbound won multiple awards, including the Bellwether Prize for socially conscious fiction. It was adapted into an acclaimed Netflix film that premiered at Sundance in January 2017 and earned four Academy Award Nominations. Hillary has a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, along with half the writers in America.

Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven novels, including Wolf Season (2017), Firecracker Award Finalist and a National Reading Group Month and Military Times selection; and Sand Queen (2011), named a “Best Contemporary War Novel” by Publishers Weekly and reviewed by The Boston Globe as “The Things They Carried for women.’”Her nonfiction book, The Lonely Soldier (2009) inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of those sexually assaulted in the military, and the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War. A recipient of the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, among other awards, Benedict is also recently the author of the book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women in Iraq, and a play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues. She is a widely published essayist and reporter.

Lynn Steger Strong

Lynn Steger Strong's second novel, WANT, will be published by Henry Holt in 2020. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, LARB, Elle, Guernica, Catapult, and elsewhere. She teaches writing.

February 2019

Julie Buntin, Onnesha Roychoudhuri, and Sarina Prabasi will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, February 7th!

The Rally continues its new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Julie Buntin

Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review, Guernica, and other publications. She has taught creative writing at New York University, Columbia University, and the Yale Writers’ Workshop, and is both an associate editor and the director of writing programs at Catapult.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and educator. A 2013 fellow at the Center for Fiction, her journalism and creative writing have appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, n+1, and Virginia Quarterly Review. A 2011 and 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, Onnesha has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center. Her book Go to Hells: An Updated Guide to Dante’s Underworld, published under the pen name Kali V. Roy, was released in April 2015. A new book, The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America will be released by Melville House Books in July 2018.

Sarina Prabasi

Sarina Prabasi is author of The Coffeehouse Resistance: Brewing Hope in Desperate Times (Green Writers Press, April 2019), Co-Founder of Buunni Coffee and CEO of WaterAid America. She was born in the Netherlands, raised in India, China and Nepal, and spent formative years in the United States and Ethiopia. Following a career leading initiatives in global health, education, water and sanitation, Sarina moved with her husband, Elias, from Addis Ababa to New York City, where they started Buunni Coffee together. Today, Buunni is a thriving business and a hub for community conversation and action.

December 2018

Stephanie Feldman, Nathaniel Popkin, and KC Trommer will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, December 6th!

The Rally continues it’s new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Stephanie Feldman

Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novel The Angel of Losses (Ecco), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, and is the co-editor of the forthcoming multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press) Her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s, Electric Literature, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Maine Review, The Rumpus, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

Nathaniel Popkin

Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the new novel Everything is Borrowed (New Door Books), called “utterly absorbing” by the writer Robin Black, and the co-editor of Who Will Speak for America?, a literary anthology in response to the American political crisis, (Temple University Press). He is the fiction review editor of Cleaver Magazine, as well as a prolific book critic—and National Book Critics Circle member—focusing on literary fiction and works in translation. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, Rain Taxi, Tablet Magazine, LitHub, The Millions, and the Kenyon Review, among other publications.

KC Trommer

Poet and essayist KC Trommer is the author of the debut collection We Call Them Beautiful as well as the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, KC has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem “Fear Not, Mary” won the 2015 Fugue Poetry Prize, judged by Kevin Prufer. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Queens Council on the Arts, the Table 4 Writers Foundation, the Center for Book Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Prague Summer Program. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Blackbird, The Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, as well as in the anthologies Resist Much, Obey Little; All We Can Hold; Bared; and Who Will Speak for America? Her essays have appeared in LitHub and in the anthology Oh, Baby! True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love, (Creative Nonfiction, 2015). She is the Assistant Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens with her son.

November 2018

Kristin Chang, Idra Novey, and Jenny Xie will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, November 4th!

The Rally continues it’s new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Kristin Chang

Kristin Chang's poetry has been anthologized in BEST NEW POETS 2018, the PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGY, BETTERING AMERICAN POETRY VOL. 3, and INK NOWS NO BORDERS. She is a Resist/Recycle/Regenerate fellow with the Wing On Wo Project in Manhattan Chinatown, which blends art-making with anti-gentrification resistance. Her debut chapbook PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES is out now from Black Lawrence Press.

Idra Novey

Idra Novey is the author of the novel THOSE WHO KNEW, out this November from Viking, and WAYS TO DISAPPEAR, winner of the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She's translated four books from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector's THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H.

Jenny Xie

Jenny Xie is the author of the poetry collection EYE LEVEL, recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and NOWHERE TO ARRIVE (Northwestern University Press, 2017), recipient of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Poets & Writers.

October 2018

Emily Raboteau, Ashley C. Ford, and Elizabeth Metzger will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, October 4th!

The Rally continues it’s new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter, and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion, a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award.  Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, The Guardian, Guernica, VQR, The Believer, Salon, McSweeney's  and elsewhere.  Honors include a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.  

Ashley C. Ford
Ashley C. Ford lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana. She is currently writing her memoir, Somebody's Daughter, which will be published by Flatiron Books under the imprint An Oprah Book. Ford has written or guest-edited for The Guardian, ELLE, BuzzFeed, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, Lenny Letter, INTO and various other web and print publications. She's taught creative nonfiction writing at The New School and Catapult.Co, and also had her work listed among Longform & Longread's Best of 2017. She has been named among Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 in Media (2017), Brooklyn Magazine's Brooklyn 100 (2016), and Time Out New York's New Yorkers of The Year (2017).

Elizabeth Metzger
Elizabeth Metzger is the Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal. In 2013, she won the Narrative Poetry Contest and was listed as one of Narrative’s 30 Under 30. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poem-a-Day on Poets.org, Poetry Magazine, and The Nation. Her essays and reviews appear in PN Review, the Southwest Review, and Boston Review. Her debut collection, The Spirit Papers, won the 2016 Juniper Prize and was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. She is an adjunct assistant professor of Writing at Columbia University, where she received her MFA and served as a University Writing Fellow and consultant in the Writing Center.

September 2018

Shelly Oria, Joseph Osmundson, and Kyle Lucia Wu will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, September 6th!

The Rally begins a new season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan. 

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Shelly Oria
Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), which earned nominations for a Lambda Literary Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, among other honors. Recently she coauthored a digital novella, CLEAN, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Oria's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and elsewhere; has been translated to other languages; and has won a number of awards, including the Workspace grant from LMCC and three MacDowell Fellowships. Oria lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches at the Pratt Institute and has a private practice as a life and creativity coach. www.shellyoria.com

Joseph Osmundson
is a scientist and writer based in New York City.  He has a PhD from The Rockefeller University in Molecular Biophysics.  His research has been supported by the American Cancer Society, published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS, and he's currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU.  His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gawker, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, The Lambda Literary Review, and The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere, too.  His book, Capsid: A Love Song won the POZ Award for best HIV writing (fiction/poetry) and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.  His second book, INSIDE/OUT is now out from Sibling Rivalry Press (January, 2018). 

Kyle Lucia Wu
Kyle Lucia Wu is a writer based in Brooklyn. She is the Programs and Communications Manager at Kundiman, a nonprofit dedicated to nurturing Asian American literature, and the co-publisher of the literary journal Joyland. She was awarded the Asian American Writers Workshop Margins fellowship in 2017, and has received residencies from the Byrdcliffe Colony and the Millay Colony. She has an MFA in fiction from The New School, and teaches at Fordham University.

June 2018

Mona Eltahawy, Camille Rankine, and T Kira Madden will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, June 7th!

The Rally finishes its second season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Mona Eltahawy

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist writer and activist. She is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution and a contributing opinion writer with the New York Times. She has reported extensively from the Middle East and North Africa for media such as Reuters News Agency and the Guardian and made a documentary for the BBC in 2014 on women and the revolutions in the region called Women of the Arab Spring.

Camille Rankine

Camille Rankine is the author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses, published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press, and the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. She is the recipient of a 2010 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. She serves on the Executive Committee for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, chairs the board of The Poetry Project, and is teaches at The New School.

T Kira Madden

T Kira Madden is a writer, photographer, and amateur magician. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PEN America, Guernica, and The Kenyon Review, and she is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She serves as the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and her debut memoir, LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2019.

May 2018

Omotara James, Laura Buccieri, and Katie Longofono—all featured readers from The Seventh Wave—will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, May 3rd!

The Rally continues its exciting sophomore season with three leading literary warriors from the pages of The Seventh Wave Magazine. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. The heart of a march in the body of a reading series—it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Check out more about our terrific lineup for this month's event:

Omotara James
Omotara James is a poet and essayist. Her poetry chapbook, "Daughter Tongue," was selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books, for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. Her debut full length collection, "Mama Wata," is forthcoming in the Fall of 2018, from Siren Songs of CCM press. She is a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow and her work has appeared in American Chordata, Seventh Wave, Cosmonauts Avenue, Newtown Literary and elsewhere. Her awards include the Bridging the Gap Award for Emerging Poets and the Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Award.

Laura Buccieri
Laura Buccieri is the author of the chapbook, on being mistaken (PANK Books, 2018). You can find her forthcoming and most recent work in Cosmonauts Avenue, Metatron, Prelude, Lambda Literary, Word Riot, Apogee, and elsewhere. She is the Publicist at Copper Canyon Press & lives in NYC.

Katie Longofono
Katie Longofono received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of three chapbooks: Angeltits (Sundress Publications 2016), Honey and Bandages (co-authored with Mary Stone; Folded Word Press 2015), and The Angel of Sex (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in The Boiler Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, BOAAT, glitterMOB, South Dakota Review, Juked, Slipstream, and more. She lives in Brooklyn.

April 2018

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Meakin Armstrong, and Brendan Kiely will be taking the Pete's Candy Store stage on Thursday, April 5th!

The Rally continues its season with three leading literary warriors of the resistance. Come see our terrific slate of readers perform, and offer them your questions, comments, and reactions. We're the heart of a march in the body of a reading series — it’s a whole new helping of overtly political discourse.

Pete's Candy Store is located at 709 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Closest trains are the L/G at Lorimer/Metropolitan.

Kaitlyn Greenidge

Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Elle.com, Vogue, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and other places. She is a contributing editor for LENNY Letter and a contributing writer for The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Meakin Armstrong

Meakin Armstrong, senior fiction editor of Guernica, is a writer, editor, and screenwriter. For eight years, he worked at The New Yorker. His work has appeared in The Atlantic and many other magazines and journals for fiction and nonfiction. Among his awards, he received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholarship for fiction and a scholarship to the Summer Literary Seminars. He has been a visiting editor to the Disquiet International Literary Program and is a frequent member of various nominating committees for top literary awards. Meakin is also a contributor to four nonfiction books and two fiction anthologies.

Brendan Kiely

Brendan Kiely is The New York Times bestselling author of All American Boys (with Jason Reynolds), The Last True Love Story, and The Gospel of Winter. His work has been published in ten languages, received a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, the Walter Dean Myers Award, the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award, and was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults. Originally from the Boston area, he now lives with his wife in Greenwich Village.

March 2018

Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura is the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, her work has been translated into 16 languages and appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. Her third novel, A Separation (Riverhead Books) was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen publications.

Tana Wojczuk
Tana Wojczuk is writing a literary biography of the queer 19th century American actress Charlotte Cusman (forthcoming from Simon and Schuster in 2019). She is a Senior Nonfiction Editor at Guernica and teaches essay writing at New York University. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Vice, Tin House, The Believer, Narrative, Bomb, Paste, Gulf Coast, Apogee, Opium and elsewhere. 

Jasmine Dreame Wagner
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is the author of On a Clear Day (Ahsahta Press) and Rings (Kelsey Street Press), winner of the Kelsey Street Press Firsts! Prize. Wagner's work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Guernica, Fence, Hyperallergic, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Seattle Review, Verse, and YETI Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

February 2018

Rob Spillman
Rob Spillman is Editor and co-founder of Tin House, an eighteen-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon) literary magazine. He is the 2017 recipient of the CLMP Energizer Award for Exceptional Acts of Literary Citizenship, the 2015 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing as well as the 2015 VIDO Award from VIDA. His memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties, was published by Grove Press in 2016.

Michele Filgate
Michele Filgate is a contributing editor at Literary Hub and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has appeared in Longreads, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Refinery29, Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Salon, Interview Magazine, Buzzfeed, and other publications. In 2016, Brooklyn Magazine named her one of "The 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture." 

Charlotte Lieberman
Charlotte Lieberman is a New York-based writer whose work often concerns feminism, the commodification of wellness, and mental health. You can read her work in The Harvard Business Review, Guernica, Marie Claire, & The Boston Review, among other publications. She lives in Greenpoint with her sister.