Join us for an evening with writers Eric Shonkwiler, Ray Shea, and special guests.

Eric Shonkwiler (above left) has had writing appear in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Fiddleblack, [PANK] Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in Fiction from University of California-Riverside, where he was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship Award, and is the Regional Editor for Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as a former reader for [PANK] and former Editor-in-Chief and fiction editor for CRATE: The Literary Journal of UCR. He is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel, Above All Men, a 2014 Midwest Connections Pick released in March from MG Press. Critics have called Above All Men “sparse and poetic” (Frank Bill) and “stark and plainspokenly honest” (Sundog Lit), and have said it “weaves a compelling narrative together with tightly written prose that makes the realities of the post-collapse society profoundly acute” (CCLaP).

A native of Boston and New Orleans and a graduate of Rice University, Ray Shea (above right) has lived in Austin for most of the last two decades. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, apt, Sundog Lit, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. His essay “Forensic Biography and the Art of the Screenwriter” was recently a finalist for the Phoebe 2014 Annual Creative Nonfiction award judged by Cheryl Strayed. He is currently at work on a collection of personal essays and a book-length memoir about fatherhood, violence, addiction, and memory, and writes poetry in his spare time.