Midway Meets Manhattan is a reading of New York area authors whose work has been published in Midway Journal, an online journal originally out of MN, now in its eleventh year. There will be seven readers, all of whom represent the diverse voices and styles that can be found published in Midway in any given issue. This event includes poets, fiction writers and nonfiction writers.
Stephen Massimilla's award-winning co-authored volume, Cooking with the Muse, came out last year from Tupelo Press. He received an SFASU Press Prize for The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat; the Bordighera Poetry Prize for Forty Floors from Yesterday (CUNY); the Grolier Poetry Prize for Later on Aiaia; a Van Rensselaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; and other honors. He has work in hundreds of publications, recently Agni, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Tampa Review, and Verse Daily. Massimilla holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and The New School.
Susan Tepper is the author of six published books of fiction and poetry. Her seventh book, a novella, will come out this year from Rain Mountain Press, NYC. Tepper has received many awards and nominations that include 7th place in the Zoetrope Novel Contest, 2nd place in StorySouth Million Writers Award, 10 Pushcart nominations, Wigleaf long-list, Glimmer Train Honorable Mention, NPR's Selected Shorts, and a Pulitzer nomination for her novel 'What May Have Been' (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). Additionally she conducts author/book interviews at The Algonquin, NYC, an infamous literary hang-out from the Hemingway years.
Irene O'Garden's writing has found its way to the Off-Broadway stage (Women On Fire, Samuel French), into hardcover (Fulcrum: Selected Poems, Nirala Press) (Fat Girl, Harper) and into dozens of respected literary journals and anthologies. She’s received fellowships, residencies and awards for her work, including a Pushcart Prize for her essay Glad To Be Human.
Britt Melewski’s poems have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Sporkpress, and Prairie Schooner among others. He curates the New York City-based reading series FREE WATER. Melewski received his MFA at Rutgers-Newark in 2012. He lives in Brooklyn.
Jhon Sanchez: A native of Colombia, Mr. Sanchez obtained political asylum in the United States. He received a JD/LLM from IU, an MFA from LIU, and he is also a contributor to Pressenza IPA. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net.
Linda Carela lives in The Bronx, NYC, and works at a humanitarian relief organization where she analyzes donor data and provides customer service. She is also trying to climb the 46 highest peaks in the Adirondacks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jelly Bucket, Limestone, and Crack the Spine. She attended The Writers Studio for four years and studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz.
Shinelle L. Espaillat earned an M.A. in Creative Writing at Temple University, and has taught various forms of writing and reading for over ten years. Her work has appeared in the collections How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching and Shale: Extreme Fiction for Extreme Times, as well as in Ghost Parachute, Cleaver Magazine and Midway Journal.