Hello.
Hi.
What a nice crowd.
What a nice crowd on this beautiful evening.
Welcome to the first Prose Series event of the year.
We are so grateful as always to the Poetry Center
for allowing us to celebrate writing
with fewer line breaks in it.
Two nights a semester in this beautiful space.
And thank you so much the Poetry Center for your care
in helping us make our authors and audience members
comfortable, and to the bookstore
for supporting our authors by having
their books available for purchase before
or now after the reading.
And after the reading, there will
be a brief Q and A. I will keep my introductory notes as brief
as I can because I'm really just here
to introduce the introducers.
On behalf of my co-coordinator of the Prose Series, Ander
Monson, and myself, I want to thank the sponsors
of tonight's reading.
The Department of English, the MFA program
in creative writing, the Institute for LGBT studies,
the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Alison Deming
and the Agnese Nelms Haury program.
Ander Monson and DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review.
And that's me.
And Poets and Writers as well.
Truly without sponsors for the Prose Series,
we would not be able to bring such esteemed guests
such as tonight's readers T Clutch Fleischmann and Andrea
Lawlor to campus.
And if you, yourself, would like to help
sponsor reading this year, please reach out
to me or to Ander.
No contribution is too small.
Our visitors sometimes like cups of coffee, for example.
We're still raising funds for this year.
And we do appreciate your help.
Before I introduce our introducers,
I'd also like to very briefly announce next month's readings
as well.
On November 8, we're proud to host our homecoming reading
featuring MFA alums who have recently published first books.
Elizabeth Bernays, Nina Boutsikaris, and Noam Dorr.
This event will be on Friday, November 8 at 6:00 PM
at Borderlands Brewing Downtown.
It's free.
And as all of our readings, open to all.
And on Tuesday, Tuesday an unusual day,
November 12th at 7:00 PM in this space, New York Times best
selling author and vanguard feminist fabulist Aimee Bender
will be reading.
Tonight, we have two readers whose work
I have relished as a reader, as a writer,
and in the classroom is a professor in all contexts
I learned so much from their work.
Each of our authors will be introduced
before they read by one of our fantastic masters of arts
in creative writing students.
T Clutch Fleischmann will be introduced by our nonfiction
writer, Austin Maas, and Andrea Lawlor
will be introduced by our fiction writer, Emi Noguchi.
So please join me in welcoming all.