The Salon Reading Series with Karen Bjorneby & Jess Wells

Saturday, October 22, 7-9pm

The Salon Reading Series features monthly readings with our esteemed teachers and some of our most promising and dedicated students. The events are free to the public. Snacks and beverages are provided.

Our October reading will feature two teachers—Karen Bjorneby and Jess Wells—who have devoted many years to the art of writing fiction. Acclaimed author, Pat Conroy, says Karen “writes stories with a voice that is uncommonly powerful, visceral and precise.” Jess Wells is our other master storyteller for the night, whose work has been hailed for its exquisite character development and incisive research. Karen’s and Jess’s students, Robin Silverman and Agatha Hinman, will also be sharing their latest pieces, making for an exciting round of readings.

November 12 Reading

Karen Bjorneby is the author of Hurricane Season: Stories from the Eye of the Storm (Sourcebooks, 2001), which received a Foreword Honorable Mention as best independent/university press short story collection of the year at Book Expo America. She has received a Pushcart Special Mention, two other Pushcart nominations, a National Magazine Award nomination, and she was named a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications including The Threepenny Review, The North American Review, New Letters, StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, The New Orleans Review, The Nebraska Review, and The Sun.

Jess Wells is the author of thirteen volumes of work, including the novel A Slender Tether on the early years of Christine de Pizan, a pioneering thinker of the 14^th century French court; and the novel The Mandrake Broom, dramatizing the fight to save medical knowledge during the witch-burning times in Europe (1465-1540). Wells is the winner of a San Francisco Art Commission Grant for Literature and a four-time finalist for the national Lambda Literary Award. Her work is included in dozens of anthologies and literary journals.

Robin Silverman works as a clinical psychologist and also has a law degree. In addition to her many professional articles, she is the author of Lemon Reef, which received the Golden Crown Award for best debut fiction, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for best mystery, and was nominated (in excerpt) for a Pushcart Prize.

Agatha Hinman graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in English. She works with a health research team editing research manuscripts for submission to science journals and has co-authored several science articles. She has published a flash fiction piece in Cleaver Magazine. Her creative writing moves back and forth between short fiction and a novel, and reflects the mix of her country childhood and urban Oakland.