Join us for an afternoon with Conor Bracken, Michael Parker, and Karen Davidson.

Conor Bracken’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Forklift OH, Muzzle Magazine, Love’s Executive Order, The New Yorker, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. His chapbook, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, will be published by Bull City Press in late 2017. A graduate of Virginia Tech, a former poetry editor for Gulf Coast, and the assistant director of a university writing center, he received his MFA from the University of Houston, in Houston, TX, where he and his wife currently live.

Michael Parker is the author of six novels—Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World—and two collections of stories, The Geographical Cure and Don’t Make Me Stop Now. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various journals including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The Southwest Review, Epoch, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, Shenandoah, The Black Warrior Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men’s Journal. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart, New Stories from the South and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, he is the Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and since 2009 has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.  He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina and Austin, Texas.

Karen Davidson is a writer and producer living in Austin, Texas. She was co-creator of the literary zine: Los Angeles, 1956, editor of Transfer Magazine, and contributing editor to the relaunch of American Short Fiction. She’s collaborated on film, music and literary projects with the Austin-based arts collective Monofonus Press, including the IF series and the four-part graphic novel Shadow Healer. She’s the recipient of two oral history grants from Texas Parks and Wildlife for projects aimed at incorporating more inclusive histories at the LBJ State Park. She wrote and produced ASSISTED LIVING, a short film forthcoming from Zilker Films in 2018, and is currently at work on a new short film which will be her directorial debut. Karen holds an MFA from UT Austin where she was a James A. Michener fellow in Screenwriting and Fiction.