NY Times and USA Today bestselling author Cathy Maxwell will speak at the monthly meeting of the SpacecoasT Authors of Romance (FL STAR) on Saturday, February 28th at the West Melbourne Public Library, W. Melbourne, FL, from noon to 4 PM. Guests are welcome to attend this event at no charge. Come and listen to Cathy’s inspiring talk! FL STAR is a chapter of Romance Writers of America. For more information, please visit our website at www.authorsofromance.com
Best-selling novelist Amy Bloom will be on the Rollins Campus February 24-27, and will give a Master Class and Reading on February 26. Click here for details: http://www.rollins.edu/winter-with-the-writers/index.html
Amy Bloom is the author of two novels and three collections of short stories. Her New York Times best-selling novel Away (Random House, 2007) was called a “literary triumph” by the Times, while The Washington Post declared it, “desperate and impassioned, erotic and moving—absolutely hypnotic.” Her first novel, Love Invents Us, was called “an unsettling tale of desire.”
Bloom’s short fiction includes Where the God Of Love Hangs Out (Random House, 2010), also a New York Times best seller; Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her first nonfiction book was Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, now a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her work has been translated into 15 languages. Her next book, Lucky Us, is forthcoming in August 2014.
A practicing psychotherapist for 20 years (after being a waitress, a bartender, an actor, and a peanut-picker), Bloom has an acute understanding of human nature and an ear especially attuned to the inner and outer voices of her characters. “I spent my professional life exploring the gap between what people said and how they said it, the chasm between what they felt and what they said they felt,” she has said.
Amy Bloom is a National Magazine Award winner. She has demonstrated her versatility and wit in the essays she has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate and Salon, on subjects as diverse as cooking lasagna, marrying at 50, and a history of portrait-painting. She is the University Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University.
On Friday, February 27th, the Kerouac House Project will be holding its first Open Mic Night, which will take place at the Gallery at Avalon Island, between 8:00 – 10:30 pm. The event will present two featured poets (Frank Messina and Caitlin Doyle) reading while accompanied by jazz pianist Per Danielsson. After the reading, there will be an open mic segment, and anyone who wants to share some work is encouraged to do so.
You can read more detailed information about the event on the Avalon Gallery website here:
http://avalongallery.org/event/kerouac-house-open-mic/
You can also read more about it by visiting the Kerouac House’s Facebook event page here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/384105525094040/?ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
Did you know that there are people who make money writing circuses? I didn’t either, until I met Stacy Barton, who is one of those creative geniuses who make the big top, well, BIG. Disney pays her to script their shows, too.
She first came to my attention when she acted in Dickens by Candlelight, and I was an enthralled audience member. Who was this person who played oldyoungmalefemalelivingdead characters so convincingly? And who made me laugh and cry into my tea and cookies?
She’s a mother like no other, too. One who makes wry jokes about the hassles of raising her passle of young’uns, then writes heart-melting “mama” poems about them.
Stacy hosts Literature Out Loud, a standout reading series at the Maitland Art Center. Did I mention she writes animated short films?
Sleep much, Stacy?
Here’s what the little lady with the big laugh has to say about Sewing Holes:
“Dadgummit – I wasn’t sure what ‘holes’ we were ‘sewing’ at first, but by the end I was bawling like a baby. Darlyn, true to her adorable southern name, has spun a yarn that caught my heart like a mullet in a cast net. Sewing Holes has that southern way of turning tragedy into story … into love.
~ Stacy Barton
Author of Surviving Nashville: Short Stories and Like Summer Grass