Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright that lives in Chicago.
A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Society of Midland Author’s Fiction Prize, he is the author of four novels, The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic 2006,) Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic 2004,) Tender as Hellfire (St. Martin’s 1999), and How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins 2001.).
His short story collection is Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir (TriQuarterly 2005.) His online serial, The Secret Hand, runs through Playboy magazine at playboy.com. His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney’s, Witness, TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Washington Square, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR.
He is a contributing editor to Punk Planet magazine and is a professor who teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.
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Carol Anshaw is the author of the novels Aquamarine, Seven Moves, and Lucky in the Corner. Her books have won the Carl Sandburg Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award. Her stories have appeared in Story magazine, Tin House, The Best American Stories and, most recently, in Do Me: Tales of Sex and Love from Tin House.
Anshaw is a past fellow of the NEA. For her book criticism she was awarded the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She is a professor in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute. She has just finished a new novel, Carry the One.
Gillian reads an excerpt from her new book Dark Places, a literary thriller about murder cults, Oklahoma tourist traps, the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, Missouri strip clubs, redheads and farming.
Gillian Flynn was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri and studied journalism at KU and Northwestern, where she earned her master’s… and discovered there was a wonderful place for a movie geek with a journalism degree: Entertainment Weekly magazine.
During her years at EW, Flynn visited the sets of films ranging from The Lord of the Rings to Jackass the Movie (the most awesome set visit ever). Gillian was also the magazine’s TV critic (best all-time show: The Wire).
Flynn’s 2006 debut novel, the literary mystery Sharp Objects, was an Edgar Award finalist and the winner of two Dagger Awards from Britain’s Crime Writers Association. It has been published in more than 20 countries. Movie rights have been sold; Gillian is currently writing the screenplay adaptation.
Gillian lives in Chicago with her husband, Brett Nolan, and a giant black cat named Roy.
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Terri Kapsalis is a writer, performer, and cultural critic whose work appears in such publications as Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, Parakeet, The Baffler, New Formations and Public. She is the author of The Hysterical Alphabet (WhiteWalls) and Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press) and the co-editor of two books related to the musician Sun Ra.
As an improvising violinist, Kapsalis has a discography that includes work with Tony Conrad, David Grubbs, and Mats Gustafsson, and she is a founding member of Theater Oobleck. She works as a health educator at Chicago Women’s Health Center and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Parlor Reading Series announces a call for emerging writers, as part of its Second Annual Summer Emerging Writer’s Festival.
Please submit short works of fiction/non-fiction between 3,000 and 5,000 words to theparlorreads@gmail.com by Wednesday, March 18th 2009.
Selected writers will be asked to read for a public audience on Saturday May 23, 2009 in Chicago, which means that readers must be willing to come to Chicago if selected.
All readings will be recorded and made available for download as part of The Parlor’s season of podcasts
Check out last year’s readers on iTunes or at www.theparlorreads.com
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Edward Chupack is an attorney for a Chicago based law firm and currently lives in the Chicago area.
He was published while in his teens, having contributed short stories and poetry to a number of literary magazines, and was the recipient of an award by the Illinois Arts Council for creative writing while in college.
His family sent him to the University of Chicago’s famous “Lab School” for a time, where his teacher wrote a direct note to his parents, telling them that Edward was destined to be a writer.
He has great nostalgia for his family’s first home in Chicago, which was purported to be the former home of a brothel owner, and where Edward spent many happy afternoons sleeping on the empty shelves of the long wooden bar in the basement. Silver is his first novel.
Zach Dodson’s hybrid typo/graphic novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, came out last year under the nom de plume Zach Plague.
He has launched such experiments as Featherproof Books, Bleached Whale Design, and The Show N’ Tell Time Talk Show.
His writing has appeared in The2ndHand, Opium, Take the Handle, and Proximity Magazine. His design has appeared in MAKE Magazine, Punk Planet, Resonance, Mule, and Bagazine.
This morning, in his bedroom, he thought he saw a cat out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look there was nothing there. He doesn’t own a cat.
Isaiah Dufort is a San Francisco based playwright and screenwriter. His plays include Absolute Pure Happiness, produced by Three Wise Monkeys Theater Company in San Francisco, and The Pheasant, winner of The Little Theater of Alexandria 2007 National One-Act Competition.
His films include Silent Anna, directed by Max Sokoloff, and Tests I Love to Take, directed by Ronald Chase. Isaiah is the assistant director of the San Francisco Art & Film Program, an arts education non-profit making the arts accessible to students.
He is also the screenwriting mentor for the SF Art & Film’s Film Workshop, and the 2008/2009 playwright-in-residence for the School of the Arts High School. With his spare time, he contributes to the 2xHR art society.
Born in the town of Winner, South Dakota, Anne Elizabeth Moore was first published at the age of 15, when a national youth literary magazine printed a poem about her feelings. In the two decades since, Moore’s work has been published in The Onion, the Chicago Reader, Bitch, Tin House, Stayfree!, The Progressive, the Journal of Popular Culture, and Punk Planet.
Moore began self-publishing, with a fanzine by and about people named Anne called AnneZine, in late 1993. Since, she has created over 30 single-shot zines on topics as significant as pie and as meaningless as international coffeeshop chains. Despite dire warnings from her financial advisors, she continues to self-publish whatever of her work she feels would just work best in a cute little hand-bound format.
For several years, in addition to the daily grind of writing for, editing, and publishing Punk Planet, Moore was the series editor for Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics. Moore is the author of Hey Kidz, Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People (Soft Skull Press, 2004), Stop Reading This: A Manifesto for Radical Literacy (Seattle Research Institute, 2004) and Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (New Press, 2008)
Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright that lives in Chicago. 
Gillian reads an excerpt from her new book Dark Places, a literary thriller about murder cults, Oklahoma tourist traps, the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, Missouri strip clubs, redheads and farming.
