The Salon Reading Series with Susie Hara & Kathleen McClung

Saturday, August 20, 7-9pm Berkeley

The summer reading series at The Writing Salon 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.

This second installment to the reading series will highlight our newest teacher to The Writing Salon community, Susie Hara, whose writing Ellen Sussman has celebrated for its “charm, wit, and real insight into the human heart.” Veteran Writing Salon teacher, Kathleen McClung, will be our other featured reader, and she has recently received a well-deserved Honorable Mention for her sonnet sequence, “Lighter Than Her Lace,” in Winning Writers’ 2015 contest. Susie and Kathleen will read with their dear students, Mike Karpa and Emma Buls.

September 24 Reading

Susie Hara’s novel, Finder of Lost Objects (Ithuriel’s Spear Press), was a finalist for a 2015 Lambda Literary Award and received a 2015 International Latino Book Award. Her stories have been published in several anthologies, including Fast Girls and Stirring up a Storm. She has a degree in Dance and English from UC Riverside, and an MA in Theater from New York University. She studied movement for a couple of decades, including modern dance, African dance, samba, yoga, and Alexander Technique. As an actor, she was a resident artist at Z Space Studio and performed with the companies Teatro de la Esperanza and Word for Word. Her play Lost and Found in the Mission won a Best of Fringe award in the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival.

Kathleen McClung is the author of Almost the Rowboat (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her memoir, poetry, and fiction have been published in the Healing Muse, Bloodroot, Unsplendid, Poets 11, Spirituality & Health, Tilt-a-Whirl, Tule Review, A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows and Ravens, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Rita Dove poetry award, Kathleen has been a finalist for the Morton Marr and Margaret Reid poetry prizes and has won awards from the Bay Area Poets Coalition, Ina Coolbrith Circle, Cultural Center of Cape Cod, Connecticut and Illinois poetry societies, and Great River Shakespeare Festival in Minnesota. She teaches writing and literature classes at Skyline College and coordinates Women on Writing (WOW) community events. www.kathleenmcclung.com

Mike Karpa’s short fiction has appeared in Faultline, Steelhead Special, and other literary magazines. Recently, several selections from his unpublished novel, Between Countries, appeared in Red Wheelbarrow. A winner of the Newton Prize, he has written about translation for national and international publications and translated from Japanese and Chinese, including works by Bai Xian-yung and million-selling author Taichi Sakaiya.

Emma Buls has been a Writing Salon student for several years, mostly recently in the Memoir Continuation class with Kathleen McClung. An avid reader and writer, Emma studied at Stanford’s MLA Program, focusing her thesis on Charlotte Brontë. She recently won first prize in the Memoir Category at the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition for her piece “Paradise Cave”. She mines her extensive travels through Europe and Southeast Asia for writing inspiration and looks forward to her next adventure. Emma lives in San Francisco with her husband.