November 18: Martha Southgate and Elizabeth Edelglass

Short stories by Elizabeth Edelglass have appeared in journals including Michigan Quarterly Review (winner of the Lawrence Foundation Prize), Lilith (winner of their short story contest), American Literary Review (second prize winner in their short fiction contest), Passages North (nominated for Best New American Voices), New Haven Review, Peregrine, Kalliope, and others. Her story “Floating Away” won the William Saroyan Centennial Prize and is forthcoming in the Saroyan Society journal In The Grove. She has been a Fiction Fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and has been a finalist or semi-finalist for an assortment of national writing awards, including finalist in two Glimmer Train short story contests. She will read a selection from her work in progress, The Same Map, a collection of connected stories that explores inner conflict along with family strife as an extended Jewish American family advances from the immigrant experience in 1924 Newark to assimilated lives in post-9/11 Connecticut, with travels along the way to the Midwest, California, and Hasidic Brooklyn. Elizabeth is the Director of the Department of Jewish Education Library of Greater New Haven, located at the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge.

Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left, which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was shortlisted for both the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy award. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere, and Essence. She was the Associate Chair of the Writing Department at Eugene Lang College at New School University and has taught there as well. She now teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.