Join us on October 26th at 7:00 PM ET for FOW Fall Fête, a celebration and fundraiser honoring the work of Friends of Writers in Durham, North Carolina presented by FOW and House Party Reading Series. The evening will feature readings by alumni and faculty from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College including Sarah Audsley, Rita Banerjee, Megan Pinto, Carter Sickels, and Connie Voisine.
The event is free and open to the public. Limited edition broadsides made by Trish Marshall will be available for sale. Audio recording will be available after the event to registrants. RSVP required.
FOW’s free and public events inspire and connect our writing community. Each event is also an invitation to support the work we do through a donation of any amount. Your generosity helps us support writers with grants and scholarships.
Hosted at a private residence in Durham, NC, the House Party Reading Series is a chance for writers and readers to hear some of the most exciting voices in contemporary letters . . . and then have a party. Head chef Ashley Nissler prepares the spread and the Bull City Press gang brings authors from all over the country to read new work.
Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She is the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and she is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this new memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter from her new memoir, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays.
Megan Pinto’s debut collection, Saints of Little Faith, is forthcoming with Four Way Books in September 2024. The winner of the 2023 Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Megan’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Megan has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Storyknife, The Peace Studio and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. She lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson. www.meganpinto.com
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City, 2020), winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012) was a Lambda Award and Triangle Publishing Award finalist, and adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, and Guernica. Carter has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. He is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. You can find more information at www.cartersickels.com.
Connie Voisine is the author of the recent book of poems, The Bower, begun on a Fulbright Fellowship to Northern Ireland. A previous book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. She has poems published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Educated at Yale University, University of California at Irvine, and University of Utah, Voisine directs the creative writing program at New Mexico State University and teaches in Warren Wilson College’s MFA for Writers. She was a 2021-2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
