Saturday, January 21, 7-9pm
The Salon Reading Series features readings with our esteemed teachers and some of our most promising and dedicated students. The events are free to the public. Snacks and beverages are provided.
Whether writing memoirs, musicals or poems, Alison Luterman brings a lyric voice to her creative work as well as immense compassion for other human beings. Be prepared for some laughs and chills during her sure-to-be-memorable reading. Accompanying Alison will be Cary Groner, who leads some of the most rigorous workshops at The Writing Salon. Cary says, “The revision process not only involves looking at structural issues . . . It also involves relentlessly ferreting out anything dishonest in the writing, by which I mean anything that is not how things are in real life.” This Saturday he will share with our room of listeners the rigorous honesty that he brings to his own fiction. For this first event in the 2017 Salon Reading Series, Alison and Cary will be reading with their two students, Colleen Tani and Sarah Norr.
Alison Luterman has been shamelessly telling tales from her own life ever since she could grip a sweaty pencil. She has published essays in The Sun, Modern Love, L.A. Review, Radiance, Response, The East Bay Express, The Boston Phoenix and Salon. She has also written an e-book of essays entitled Feral City, about midlife domestication, remarriage, and second chances (available from SheBooks). Alison is also the author of three books of poetry: The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, and Desire Zoo. Last but not least, she writes plays, including Saying Kaddish With My Sister, Glitter and Spew, and a musical, The Chain. Visit her website for more details.
Cary Groner’s debut novel, Exiles (Spiegel & Grau / Random House), was a Chicago Tribune best book of 2011. His short stories have won numerous awards, including the Glimmer Train fiction open, and appeared there and in other venues that include American Fiction, Mississippi Review, Southern California Review, Sycamore Review, Tampa Review, Zymbol, and Salamander. Cary earned his MFA in 2009 from the University of Arizona, where he also taught undergraduate fiction writing. His students have been accepted at several prestigious MFA programs, including the University of Texas’s Michener Center, Johns Hopkins, the University of Tampa, and Antioch.
Colleen “Coke” Tani writes lyrical and experimental memoir-based prose and poetry. Her work has included “Beat the Buddha Day” in Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press, 2004), “Beyond the Swallow” in ONTHEBUS (Bombshelter Press, 2000), “Beyond the Swallow” in Moving Pictures: Nine Los Angeles Poets (The Best Press, 1997), and “Sand” in Spillway (Bombshelter Press, 1997). She holds an MSW from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is currently working on her first book-length project.
Sarah Norr is a musician, writer and community organizer based in Oakland. She was shaped as a person and a writer by ten years of social justice work with low-wage immigrant workers. She currently manages a union office and teaches street drumming workshops to women and youth. In her writing, she looks for the overlap between social realism, nature, and magic.