Cris Mazza is the author of over a dozen books, including Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, which will be released in 2011. A native of Southern California, she relocated to Illinois when she began teaching in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She lives 50 miles west of Chicago with her golden retrievers.

She also talks to the masterminds behind two Chicago-based reading series, The Dollar Store and Quickies.

He descends from downstate Irish farmers and Humboldt Park tenement Italians. He has made a lot of records, mostly with his band Joan of Arc, and is now in his final semester of the SAIC MFAW FYI.

Kate Zambreno is an editor at Nightboat Books and a former senior editor of the Chicago alt-weekly, Newcity. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Believer, Bookforum, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. She keeps the literary blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister.

Kate reads from her debut novella O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus Press), a triptych of modern-day America set in a banal Midwestern landscape, inspired by Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” as well as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Of the book the performance artist Karen Finley wrote that “Kathy Acker would be proud” and Chris Kraus compared it to Angela Carter’s fairytales.

Emerging Writers Festival Schedule

4:00 pm Sarah Terez Rosenblum – Where She Is

4:30 pm Jeanie Chung – Cuts and Folds

5:00 pm Peter Anderson – One Son Resists

5:30 – 5:45 BREAK

5: 45 pm J.D.K. Goodman – Another Place, Another Time

6:15 pm Jessie Morrison – The Queens of the Northwest Side

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

Terri’s Summer Reading:
Weight, Jeannette Winterson
Don Quixote, Cervantes
History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
Religion without Belief, Jean Petrolle
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
Secret of Scent, Luca Turin
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq

Caroline’s Summer Reading:
Halls of Fame, John D’Agata
The Vagabond, Collette
The Illiad, Homer (Richard Lattimore translation)
Three Tales, Gustav Flaubert
What You Call Winter, Nalini Jones
Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process: A
Dialectical-Constructivist View, Irwin Z. Hoffman
Somebody in Boots, Nelson Algren
Live Girls, Beth Nugent
The Monk, Matthew Lewis
The Shaman from Elko, Edited by Garth Hill

Joanna’s Summer Reading:
Someone to Run With, David Grossman
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, Diane Ackerman
Joe College/The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
Audition, Barbara Walters (I can’t help it, I’m curious)
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk
Run, Ann Patchett
The Luxe, Anna Godbersen
Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer