Sundays at Erv's

It's spring at Erv's! Join host Madeline Stevens Sunday May 14th at 6pm, sip a cocktail and listen to the lovely words of these amazing writers: George Kovalenko's poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review Online, At Length, and Horsethief. He received his MFA from New York University. He serves as an editor for Poet's Country, teaches writing and literature at SUNY Westchester, and lives in Brooklyn. Gabriela Garcia is a Brooklyn-based poet whose work has appeared in Word Riot, Parallax, and NPR, among others. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University and the founder of the podcast On Poetry. Hilary Leichter's writing has appeared in The Southern Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, n+1, Guernica, Hobart, Tin House, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from The Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Table 4 Writers Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a contributing editor at NOON Annual. Kate Doyle received her MFA from NYU and was a graduate fellow at NYU Paris. Her writing has appeared in the Franklin Electric Reading Series, Meridian, No Tokens, Lamprophonic, and the NYU Emerging Writers Reading Series.

Sundays at Erv's presents four amazing writers in our new expanded space (same address! more chairs!) on Sunday April 9th. Join host Madeline Stevens at 6pm for brilliant words and delectable cocktails. About the writers: Molly Pohlig lives in Lefferts Gardens, writing and editing for a knitting magazine. She has written about mental illness and other, funnier things, her work has appeared on Slate, The Hairpin, The Toast, and Racked.com.Her best friend is her hedgehog, Finn. Randy Brown Winston, milkshake scholar, is a creator of tales, real and surreal. He writes about death, religion, and politics in times unknown, and worlds afar, but much like our own. Winston received his MFA in Creative Writing at The New School, and is the Associate Fiction Editor at Slice Literary Magazine. Colter Jackson works as a freelance writer and illustrator in New York City and has written scripts for Tina Fey and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, only one of which was funny. She is the author and illustrator of the picture book Elephants Make Fine Friends (Penguin 2015). You can find some of her work in Bellevue Literary Review, Hippocampus Magazine, GOOD Magazine, Tin House, The Rumpus and the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. She is also part of the reading team at One Story magazine. She has been a Ledig House International Fellow and a recipient of the Helene Wurlitzer Grant. In 2014, she was shortlisted for the Lorian Hemingway Short Story competition. She has been awarded fellowships for Hedgebrook, MacDowell, UCROSS and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Annie Christain is an associate professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill with poems appearing in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, The Chariton Review, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She received the grand prize of the 2013 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the 2013 Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the 2015 Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the 2015 Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Additional honors include her being selected for the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel Artist Residency and the Arctic Circle Autumn Art and Science Expedition Residency. Tall As You Are Tall Between Them, her debut poetry book, was published in fall 2016 by C&R Press.

There's a lot to celebrate this month at Sundays at Erv's! March marks the two-year anniversary of this little reading series, as well as the opening of the new expanded space at Erv's! We've got five stellar readers to present, party hats and other favors, and, as always, Erv's famous cocktails. Join host Madeline Stevens March 12th at 6pm and listen to the literary stylings of fav Erv's alum Yahdon Israel and Zef Lisowski as well as new voices Marisa Crawford, Larissa Pham, and Saxon Baird. Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections Reversible (2017) and The Haunted House (2010) from Switchback Books, as well as two chapbooks. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in publications including Hyperallergic, BUST, Bitch, The Hairpin, and Fanzine, and are forthcoming in Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books, 2017). Marisa is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the feminist literary/pop culture website Weird Sister. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Yahdon Israel is a 26 year-old writer from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, who writes about race, class, gender and culture in America. He has written for Avidly, The New Inquiry, ESPNW and Brooklyn Magazine. He's a contributing editor at LitHub. He recently graduated with his MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the New School. He runs a popular Instagram page which promotes literature and fashion under the hashtag Literaryswag. He's the Content and Social Media Director for MakersFinders, a digital platform that connects independent makers to passionate finders through stories. Above all else: he keeps it lit. Larissa Pham is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, The Nation, Adult Mag, Nerve, New York Magazine, Maxim, Dazed, Salon, Adbusters, GOOD, The Rumpus, The Hairpin, Gawker, VICE, The Intentional, Packet Bi-Weekly, The Yale Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the author of Fantasian, a New Lovers novella from Badlands Unlimited. Zef Lisowski a non-binary poet and NYC transplant; their work has been published most recently in Vetch, the journal of trans and genderqueer poetry, but also in Hobart, FreezeRay Poetry, decomP Magazine, and other journals. They are a poetry reader and staffer for Apogee Journal as well. Saxon Baird has written for Guernica, Slate, Vice Sports, Gothamist, EATER, 3:AM, Fanzine, Blunderbuss, Teen Vogue, Large Up and other places. His also produced numerous radio documentaries for PRI's Peabody-Award winning program Afropop Worldwide. He moonlights as a bartender.

Sundays at Erv's is back and ready to present four amazing writers February 12th at 6pm. Join host Madeline Stevens, warm up with some spirits, and listen to the literary stylings of Joanna C. Valente, Nicole Fix, Fraylie Nord, and Yardenne Greenspan. Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (2016, ELJ Publications), & Xenos (2016, Agape Editions). They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM. Some of their writing has appeared in Prelude, The Atlas Review, The Feminist Wire, BUST, Pouch, and elsewhere. They also teach workshops at Brooklyn Poets. Nicole Fix is a recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and was a finalist for Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. Publication credits include Post Road Magazine and the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. Nicole performed at The Moth: Faith Lost and Found, a community workshop. In addition, Nicole co-founded the New York City based, award-winning theater company, Page 73 Productions. She holds a BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. Fraylie Nord lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in Armchair/Shotgun, Tin House Flash Fridays, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Bridge Eight, Oblong Magazine, and elsewhere. Yardenne Greenspan has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators’ Association Fellowship, and in 2014 she was a resident writer and translator at Ledig House’s Writers Omi program. Her translation of Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin (New Vessel Press), was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Yardenne has also translated work by Alex Epstein, Yochi Brandes, and Amir Gutfreund, among others. Yardenne blogs for Ploughshares, and her writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Asymptote, The Massachusetts Review, and Words Without Borders, among other publications.

Sarah Perry has an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Crown Heights. She is the recipient of a Javits Fellowship and has been a resident at the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Playa Summer Lake, and Norton Island, in her home state of Maine. Her memoir, After the Eclipse, about a mother’s murder, a daughter’s love, and the persistence of gender-based violence, will be released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt later this year. Nancy Hightower has published short fiction and poetry in journals such as storySouth, Sundog Lit, Gargoyle, Prick of the Spindle, and Word Riot. Her novel, Elementarí Rising (2013) received a starred review in Library Journal and was chosen as Debut of the Month. In October 2015, Port Yonder Press published The Acolyte, which was nominated it for an Elgin Award by The Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2016. Currently, she cohosts the live literary journal Liars’ League NYC with Andrew Lloyd Jones, and has guest curated readings for HIP Lit and the Hi-Fi Reading Series, bringing in writers such as Alice Kim, Carmen Machado, and Mensah Demary. From 2014-2016 she was the science fiction and fantasy reviewer for The Washington Post. She is now working on a book about digital narratives with Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and is on the board of directors for Epiphany Magazine. Jeremy Freedman is a writer and artist living in New York City. His poems have been published in Pioneertown, Queen Mob’s, Cleaver, The Missing Slate, Otoliths and elsewhere. His photographs have been exhibited in Europe and the United States and have been recently featured in Hothouse, Redivider, the Monarch Review, the Citron Review and the Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. More work can be seen at jfreenyc.com. Linda Harris Dolan is a poet and editor. She holds an M.A. in English & American Literature focusing on the postcolonial from NYU, and an M.F.A in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Starworks Creative Writing Fellow. She’s former Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review and has taught at The King’s College and NYU. Linda's work appears in The Grief Diaries, Roanoke Review, and Blood and Thunder, and she's a 2016 Best of the Net nominee. Her work combines poetry with photography, interview, and received speech to portray histories of medicine and the sick body.

Brooklyn's coziest reading series is back December 11th with brilliant readers Wo Chan, Deirdre Coyle, Andrew Cothren, and Christine Scanlon. Join host Madeline Stevens at 6pm, grab one of Erv's famous cocktails and listen! Wo Chan is a queer Fujianese poet and drag performer. They hold fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a member of Brooklyn-based drag alliance Switch n' Play, Wo has performed at venues including Brooklyn Pride, The Trevor Project, and Vox Populi. Their all Asian American experimental theater piece WHITEFLAG/WHITEFACE debuted at the Dixon Place HOT! Festival in 2016. Deirdre Coyle is a writer, fashion librarian, and non-practicing mermaid living in Brooklyn. Her work can be found in Lit Hub, Hobart, Hello Giggles, Luna Luna Magazine, Cheap Pop, and elsewhere. She likes talking about goth stuff at @DeirdreKoala. Andrew Cothren’s work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, and The Atlas Review. He received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and currently lives in Brooklyn. Christine Scanlon is a graduate of The New School MFA program and currently an adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York. She is the author of a book of poems, A Hat on the Bed (Barrow Street Press), and has had work forthcoming and previously published in Flag and Void, Bort Quarterly, and Best American Poetry 2005. Her chapbook manuscript, Nostalgia: An Archive of Instructional Films, was selected as finalist by Gazing Grain Press. She is also the co-curator, with Jenna Cardinale, of the Brooklyn reading series, Readings in Color.

Join host Madeline Stevens at Erv's on Beekman November 13th at 6pm, sip one of Erv's famous fall cocktails, and listen to the brilliant words of Lynn Steger Strong, Maria Gabriele Baker, and Ananda Lima! Lynn Steger Strong's first novel, HOLD STILL, was published in March 2016. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Catapult, Elle, Lithub, and elsewhere. She teaches at Columbia and Pratt and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Maria Gabriele Baker is a writer of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as a translator of all things German. Print Publications include Sonora Review, The Felt Lab Series, Manhattan Theater Source's Estrogenius Collection, among others. Her plays have been developed and produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre, and various other NYC and NJ theaters, and by diemonopol in Austria. She's a founding member of Verbal Supply Company (an Audible Writers' Collective) and is currently working on her MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute. Ananda Lima holds an MA in Linguistics from UCLA. She was a mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Program and has attended workshops at Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Tin House. She has taught at UCLA and Montclair State University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review and Escarp. Ananda is currently working on a novel set in Brasilia, where she grew up as the daughter of migrants from Northeast Brazil, and a collection of poems.

We're so excited about our October reading line-up over at Erv's! Come sip a cocktail with host Madeline Stevens and listen to the fantastic words of these four writers: Sasha Banks is a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Kinfolks Quarterly, Alight, Poor Claudia, Austin IPF, B O D Y Literature, The Collagist, and has been performed in Tulane University’s Vagina Monologues. Sasha is the creator of Poets for Ferguson and a MFA candidate at the Pratt Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is learning to be Black and spectacular at the same damn time. Delphine Bedient is a writer and maker currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published by Blunderbuss Magazine, Fog Machine and Bottlecap Press, and a collection of her shorter pieces, entitled Down and Out on a Yacht, is available from Two Plum Press. She spends most of her time touching books. See more of her work at delphinebedient.com. Matthew Daddona is an associate editor at Dey Street Books, where he edits nonfiction in the categories of narrative journalism, pop culture, music, sports, and memoir. As a freelance journalist, poet, and fiction writer, he has published work in Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Gigantic, Outside Magazine, Slice, The Adirondack Review, The Southampton Review, and LitHub, among other places. For three years he was a founding member of FLASHPOINT NYC, an improvisational performance group, and he currently co-hosts the reading series “Kill Genre,” in which poets test their skills in non-poetry genres. He is also an editor at The Scofield, an online literary journal. Nicholas Goodly is a teaching fellow at Columbia University and is the writing editor of WUSSY Magazine. He has also been published in Anamesa Journal, Poetry Pacific and Cactus Heart and forthcoming in Lambda Literary Online.