Wednesday, April 18 @ 7PM | Housing Works Bookstore Café

Don’t miss a night of extraordinary storytelling at one of the best literary spots in NYC!

National Poetry Slam Champion, Elizabeth Acevedo will read from her debut novel, The Poet X, along with readings by PEN Open Book Award nominee, Jade Sharma, and 2017 Prairie Schooner Prize Winner, Sara Batkie. Sponsored by Adelphi University MFA in Creative Writing. Free and open to the public.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop. She is the author of Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths (Yes Yes Books) and debut novel, The Poet X (HarperCollins, 2018).

JADE SHARMA is the author of Problems, which was long listed for the PEN Open Book award. The NYT called it clever and noted, “a book about heroin shouldn’t be this much fun to read,” and The Rumpus said, “The only problem with Problems is that it ends.” Originally an eighth-grade dropout, Sharma now holds an MFA from The New School. She currently teaches workshops at Catapult, and freelances as a private content editor. Sharma is in treatment for bipolar disorder. She is working on her second novel, OK, and resides on the LES with a small black dog.

SARA BATKIE was born in Seattle and raised in the wilds of Connecticut and Iowa. She holds a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where she graduated from the Fiction program in 2010. Her stories have been published in various journals, received mention in the 2011 Best American Short Stories anthology, and, most recently, honored with a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Currently she lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as the Writing Programs Director for The Center for Fiction. Her story collection Better Times won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in September 2018.