Join us Tuesday, December 6, at 7 p.m. for Birch Bark editing & MicroLit Almanac’s Best of the Net Readings and Benefit for Ukraine, hosted by Marjana Savka from Kyiv. Featured readers include Judith Baumel, Ciaran Cooper, Ruth Edgett, Gail Hosking, Craig Holt, Cheryl Pappas, and Erica Plouffe Lazure.
If you can’t make it, please consider making a donation to Razom, a nonprofit organization benefiting Ukraine. Another possible way to support Ukraine is to buy the anthology Ukrainian-American Poets Respond. All proceeds from the sale of this anthology support the Ukrainian people in this time of war. (Here’s the recording of the event.)
Marjana Savka is a Ukrainian writer, publisher, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Staryi Lev Publishing House, a member of the Ukrainian PEN Center.
Judith Baumel is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as president of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of The Poetry Society of America and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. Her books are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, The Kangaroo Girl and Passeggiate. Her poetry, translations and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other places. Her work is represented in a number of anthologies including Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish American Poetry ; Gondola Signore Gondola: Poems on Venice; and Poems of New York (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets). She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the writer Philip Alcabes.
Ciaran Cooper’s writing has appeared in Salamander, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, The Midwest Prairie Review, and Fiction Southeast, among other journals. Cooper holds an MFA from Bennington College. He has won several awards for his writing, The Pinch’s annual fiction contest. He’s also received artist fellowship awards from the Illinois Arts Council and Salem Art Works. For more information, please visit Ciaran’s website.
A Maritime Canadian by birth and upbringing, Ruth Edgett is a former print journalist and prize-winning short story writer with fiction and non-fiction published and forthcoming in books, magazines and journals based in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. She is author of A Watch in the Night: The story of Pomquet Island’s last lightkeeping family (Nimbus, 2007), a narrative non-fiction book about her mother’s family. A novelist in waiting, Ruth is seeking a home for one manuscript and is writing a second. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Prince Edward Island and a MS in Communications Management from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University.
Craig Holt is the author of the novel, Hard Dog to Kill (WildBlue Press 2017) which won the Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. His flash fiction has appeared in Psychopomp Magazine and the Tahoma Literary Review, and his story Good Bones was a Pushcart Prize nominee. The two things he fears most in this world are sharks and clowns.
Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake's Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (University of Iowa Press) and the poetry collection Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). She holds an MFA from Bennington College and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for 15 years. She is a member of the Author's Guild. Her essays and poems have appeared in such places as Lilith Magazine, Upstreet, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Nimrod International, and Consequence Magazine.
Cheryl Pappas is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger (Word West Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. She teaches the online Hermit Crab Flash Workshop. She lives just outside Boston. For more information, please visit Cheryl’s website. Purchase The Clarity of Hunger here.
Erica Plouffe Lazure is the author of the short story collection, Proof of Me + Other Stories (New American Press, March 2022) and two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard Around Town (2015). Her fiction is published in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Carve, Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The MacGuffin, The Southeast Review, Phoebe, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Hippocampus Magazine, The Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, NH and can be found online at www.ericaplouffelazure.com
Birch Bark provides editing at all levels, coaching services, and Mix & Meet writing groups, as well as our InConversation events with emerging and established authors. Reach out to us! We want to hear from you: BirchBarkEditing@gmail.com.
Please help subsidize our free offerings so our costs can be kept low. We appreciate your support as we build community!