BWS Reading Series – a Bookend Event

In celebration of The Brooklyn Book Festival and the fall equinox, which is the start of everyone’s most productive time of year, the Brooklyn Writers Space, creative home to writers of all disciplines, is opening its doors to the literary community from 4-7pm for a rooftop happy hour on Saturday, September 21^st. This will also be the kick-off reading for our 2019-2020 reading series featuring, Heidi Diehl, Jai Chakrabarti, Juliet Escoria, and Courtney Zoffness. 

Heidi Diehl is the author of the novel Lifelines(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Her short fiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review, Witness, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Marble House Project, Norton Island/Eastern Frontier Foundation, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center, she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Since 2010, she has taught expository and creative writing at Brooklyn College, where she is also the assistant director of the freshman writing program.

Jai Chakrabarti’s novel, A Play for the End of the World, and story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, are forthcoming from Knopf Doubleday. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Jai was an Emerging Writer’s Fellow with A Public Space in 2015 and received his MFA from Brooklyn College.

Juliet Escoria is the author of the novel Juliet the Maniac, published by Melville House in May 2019. She also wrote the poetry collection Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press 2016) and the story collection Black Cloud(CCM/Emily Books 2014), which were both listed in various best of the year roundups. Her writing can be found in places like Lenny, Tyrant, VICE, The Fader, Dazed, and Hobart, and has been translated into many languages. She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia. (Photo credit: Saja Montague)

Courtney Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest international prize for short fiction. Other accolades include the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Award, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Center for Fiction, and two residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony. She was named a notable essayist in Best American Essays 2018. Recent work has appeared The Southern Review, Longreads, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the hot-off-the-pressMcSweeney’s anthology, Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University.