Winter with the Writers occurs every Thursday in February, 2015, starting on the 5th with Sapphire.

Sapphire will lead a master class at 4 p.m. in the Bush Auditorium. The evening portion of the event, which will include a reading, on-stage interview, and signing, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Bush Auditorium.

From the WWW website:

February 5, 2015, 7:30 p.m.

February 5, 2015, 4:00 p.m.

Master Class

Bush Auditorium

Speaker Bio

The New York Times best seller, Push—about an illiterate, brutalized Harlem teenager—won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction; the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award; and in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Push was named by The Village Voice as one of the top 25 books of 1996 and by TIMEOUT New York as one of the top 10 books of 1996. Push was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. It was made into the Academy Award-winning major motion film, Precious, and the film adaptation received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress.

In her second novel, The Kid, Sapphire gives voice to Precious’s son, telling the electrifying story of Abdul Jones. Left alone by his mother’s death to navigate in a world where love and hate sometimes hideously masquerade, forced to confront unspeakable violence, his history, and the dark corners of his own heart, Abdul claws his way toward adulthood. In a generational story that moves with the speed of thought from a Mississippi dirt farm to Harlem in its heyday, from a troubled Catholic orphanage to downtown artists’ lofts, The Kid is a soaring tale of body and spirit, rooted in the hungers of flesh and of the soul. Says editor Ann Godoff, “Sapphire never fails to render the hardest material comprehensible by coming from a place of love. In her second novel, she fearlessly explores the young life of an African American boy as he approaches manhood: alone, brutalized and with the soul of an artist.”

Sapphire is also the author of two collections of poetry: American Dreams, cited by Publisher’s Weekly as, “One of the strongest debut collections of the nineties;” and Black Wings & Blind Angels, of which Poets & Writers declared, “With her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection retains Sapphire’s incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds.” Library Journal calls Sapphire’s poetry “spiky and uncompromising” and describes her as a “poet of slick-talking, nearly hallucinatory riffs on growing up poor, tough, and black in America.”

Wordier Than Thou’s next storytelling and prose open mic is Tuesday, Feb. 11, 7 p.m., at Stardust Video and Coffee.

Here’s some more info about the event:

This unique open mic focuses on storytelling — no poetry or music. So come share your finest prose, or if you’re just in the mood for listening, catch some tales from our area’s wordsmiths.

Readings will begin around 7 p.m.

Featured readers will kick off the night, and will be followed by open mic slots. Open mic readers get 10 minutes and will be timed.

This month’s featured readers are Suzannah Gilman and Lynn Waddell.

Gilman is an editor and contributor to the cooperative blog, The Gloria Sirens, a virtual auditorium to showcase women writers. A licensed attorney, she has published poetry, essays, fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Florida Review, Pearl, CALYX Journal, The Dead Mule School of Southern
Literature, Slow Trains and others. She has twice been nominated for a Puschart Prize.

Waddell is an award-winning journalist and author of “Fringe Florida,” an offbeat tome that takes readers inside some of the state’s most eclectic and daring worlds. She’s covered major Florida news stories for national publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek,
DailyBeast.com and NPR.com. She’s worked for the Las Vegas Sun and the Weekly Planet.

Suggested donation of $5 at the door.

You can find more info at www.wordierthanthou.com.

Florida authors Glenda Bailey-Mershon and Sandra Gail Lambert will read from and sign their books during First Friday Art Walk at Anastasia Books, 81-C King Street in St. Augustine, on Friday, March 6, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Bailey-Mershon is a St. Augustine resident who helped found the Ancient City Poets and has long served as an editor of the Jane’s Stories anthologies of women’s writing, while publishing her own short stories and poems in various journals and anthologies. Her novel, Eve’s Garden, is the story of three generations of a Romani-American (“Gypsy”) family surviving in a North Georgia mill town: Eve, a young girl struggling to find her identity during the rock ‘n’ roll era; her mother, Maisie, who fears the prejudices of town folk; and her grandmother, Evangeline, who serves the community even as she is a target of nasty gossip. Eve is nearly overcome by a tragedy involving her estranged best friend and alienated by her mother’s secrecy. She flees her hometown, only to return due to family illness. When she finds a man she loves who doesn’t want to leave, Eve must face her own grief and discover the legacy of her grandmother’s secret garden.

Sandra Gail Lambert’s fiction and memoir have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including New Letters, Brevity, Water~Stone Journal, The Weekly Rumpus, Arts & Letters and the North American Review. Excerpts of The River’s Memory, her debut novel, have won prizes from Big Fiction Magazine and the Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, a home base for kayak trips to her beloved rivers and coastal marshes.

More about both authors can be found at their publisher’s web site: www.twistedroadpublications.com.