FICTION STRANGE AS LIFE - FRIDAY OCT 13 IN THE BLUE ROOM TMR, 7PM
Date: Oct 02, 2017
On Friday, October 13th, (cue ominous thunder) Third Man Books is excited to present: FICTION STRANGE AS LIFE (because life isn’t always stranger than fiction) a speculative fiction-focused reading that will also feature the psychedelic musical stylings of Nashville’s own ORNAMENT. October being the month of the year for the mysterious, it only seemed appropriate to dive into the weird unknown and celebrate in Blue Room. From these authors, we will all learn real truths about ourselves.
Award-winning author Kiini Ibura Salaam will be making her Nashville debut, which we’ve been itching with anticipation since TMB released her second collection of stories, When the World Wounds, last fall. Joining her will be renowned fiction writer Pinckney Benedict (we highly recommend you wet your whistle with the chilling “The Beginnings of Sorrow”), and Nashville’s own writer Betsy Phillips—whose short collection Jesus, Crawdad, Death, is forthcoming from Third Man Books.
This is an all ages event, however, a bar will be available with libations. Tickets are available here.
Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events, and personal freedom. She has been widely published and anthologized in such publications as the Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Colonize This! anthologies, as well as Essence, Utne Reader, and Ms. magazines. Her short story collection Ancient, Ancient — winner of the 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. award — contains sensual tales of the fantastic, the dark, and the magical. Her micro-essays on writing can be found at www.kiiniibura.com or in her Notes From the Trenches ebook series. When the World Wounds (Third Man Books 2016) is her second collection of speculative short stories.
Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. He attended Princeton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published a novel (Dogs of God) and three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Miracle Boy and Other Stories. His work has been published in, among other magazines and anthologies, Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, the O. Henry Award series, the Pushcart Prize series, the Best New Stories from the South series, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, and The Oxford Book of the American Short Story, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Benedict is the recipient of, among other awards and honors, a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fiction grant from the Illinois Arts Council, two Plattner Awards for fiction from Appalachian Heritage magazine, a Literary Fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, and the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award. Benedict has taught on the writing faculties of Oberlin College, Princeton University, Davidson College, and Hollins University, and he now serves as a professor in the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and on the core faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC.
Betsy Phillips’s short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Apex Magazine. She is the author of A City of Ghosts and The Wolf’s Bane. She writes about history and politics for the Nashville Scene and, occasionally, in the Washington Post. Her short collection, Jesus, Crawdad, Death is forthcoming from Third Man Books. She is currently working on an afghan.
