Celebrate Winter While We Still Have Seasons: An Evening with The Rumpus and Akashic Books

By Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe

Dec 11  |  Community

Winter is coming, but we may not have many winters left, so let’s celebrate the cold while we can! The Rumpusand Akashic Books present readings from Julie Buntin(Marlena), Anaïs Duplan (Take This Stallion), Tracy O’Neill (The Hopeful), Lauren Sanders (The Book of Love and Hate), and Katia D. Ulysse (Drifting), with mcee Elissa Bassist.

Elissa Bassist is a self-described essayist, humor writer, Netflix subscriber, and editor of the Funny Women column on TheRumpus.net. She writes literary, cultural, feminist, and personal criticism, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Creative Nonfiction, NewYorker.com, NYMag.com, TheParisReview.org, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Bitch Media, Jezebel, The Hairpin, National Lampoon,  The Los Angeles Review of Books, A Women’s Thing, oddly Men’s Health, and more, a lot more. Her sad essay “The Never-to-Be Bride” is “Notable” in The Best American Essays. Currently, she is a writer’s assistant for The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (past honorees include Will Ferrell, Ellen DeGeneres, Carol Burnett, Eddie Murphy, and Bill Murray) and In Performance at the White House. Before moving to Brooklyn, she produced and co-hosted Literary Death Match in San Francisco and co-edited the anthology Rumpus Women, Volume I with Julie Greicius. Elissa was managing editor of The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as associate editor of various other impressive books, and has since gone on to be a barista. She teaches humor writing at The New School and Catapult in NYC.

Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction writing at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Anaïs Duplan is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). Their poems and essays have appeared in Hyperallergic, on PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Fence, Boston Review, The Journal, and in other publications. Duplan is also an artist and curator who has facilitated exhibitions at the Distillery Gallery, Elastic Arts, Disjecta, the Radical Abacus, Public Space One, and at Mengi in Reykjavík, Iceland. Their visual works have appeared or are forthcoming in group exhibitions at Flux Factory, Thomas Robertello Gallery, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in LA. Anaïs is the founder of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color in Iowa City and is the joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Katia D. Ulysse is a fiction writer, born in Haiti. Her short stories, essays, and Pushcart Prize–nominated poetry appear in numerous literary journals. She has been anthologized in Mozayik: An Anthology in the Haitian Language, The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, and Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat. She has taught in Baltimore public schools for thirteen years. Drifting, a collection of short stories, drew high praise from literary critics. She is the Kratz Center Writer-in-Residence at Goucher College, and she blogs on voicesfromhaiti.com. Mouths Don’t Speak is her latest novel.

Tracy O’Neill is the author of The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2015. The same year, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, LitHub, BOMB, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Literarian, New World Writing, Narrative, Scoundrel Time, Guernica, Bookforum, Electric Literature, Grantland, Vice, The Guardian, VQR, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her column Body Language appears in Catapult. She holds an MFA in fiction from the City College of New York and an MA in communications from Columbia University. She currently teaches at the City College of New York and is editor-in-chief of the literary journal Epiphany.

Lauren Sanders is the author of two novels—Kamikaze Lust, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and With or Without You. Her writing has appeared in various publications and journals including Bookforum, the American Book Review, and Time Out New York. She is a resident of the great nation of Brooklyn. The Book of Love and Hate is her latest novel.