January 19th: Sheila Kohler and Lisa Siedlarz

Lisa Siedlarz's debut poet collection, I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball, was published in 2009 by Clemson University Digital Press. Lisa holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Western Connecticut State University. She is the editor of Connecticut River Review and managing editor of Connecticut Review. She has won the John Holmes Poetry Prize and the Leo Connellan Award and was nominated for the 2009 Best New Poets Award. She also facilitated a 16-week writing workshop with Vietnam veterans and edited a collection of their work called The Season of Now. Lisa works for Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven.

Sheila Kohler’s most recent novel, Becoming Jane Eyre, will be published in January 2010 by Viking, Penguin. She has written six other novels: The Perfect Place (1989) ; The House on R Street (1994); Cracks (1999); Children of Pithiviers (June, 2001); Crossways (2004); and Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness (, 2007); and three collections of short stories: Miracles in America (1990); One Girl (1999); and Stories from Another World (2003). Her work has been translated in a variety of languages including Hebrew and Japanese and published widely abroad.

Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in a host of top publications. A very abbreviated list includes The Antioch Review, the Yale Review, the Boston Globe, Bomb magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Story. Sheila has received the O.Henry twice, the Open Voice Award, the Smart Family Foundation prize, The Willa Cather Prize, and the Antioch Review Prize. In addition, Sheila was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2003-4.

An acclaimed instructor, Sheila has taught creative writing in many programs such as the Bennington Writing Seminars, City College, The New School, the West Side YMCA, and Columbia's program in Montolieu, France. She currently teaches at Princeton.

December 15: April Bernard and Jude Stewart

April Bernard is an author and teacher from Bennington, VT. She teaches at Bennington College and at Skidmore College in New York.

Romanticism, April's most recent poetry collection, was published in June 2009. Her prior publications include three books of poetry: Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, and one novel, Pirate Jenny. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books and is included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English and By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. She has also received a Guggenheim Award.

Jude Stewart has written on design, art and culture for Slate, the Believer, I.D., Metropolis, BusinessWeek, Nextbook and Print, as well as a column on color for STEP Inside Design Magazine which she is developing into a book. She has lectured about design at RISD, the Adult Education series in Brooklyn, and the Fachhochschule Mainz in Germany and been interviewed on related topics on NPR's Day to Day and by Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Her introduction to mobile architecture appears in More Mobile: Portable Architecture Today (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

A recipient of the Free University Berlin's European Journalism Fellowship, in 2005 - 2006 she pursued a year-long independent project on the influence of the former East Germany's design on current visual culture in Berlin. Jude divides her time between Berlin, Germany, and New Haven, USA, where she is also co-curator of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series. Read more at www.judestewart.com or follow her daily tweets on color at twitter.com/joodstew.

November 17: Susan McCallum-Smith and Adrienne Kane

Susan McCallum-Smith is a freelance editor, and writes fiction, non-fiction and reviews. Her work has been featured in, amongst others, Urbanite, The Scottish Review of Books, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Gettysburg Review, and her reviews are often heard on Maryland Public Radio. She received her degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and Bennington College. Her short story collection, Slipping the Moorings, was published in early 2009 by Entasis Press. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and currently lives in Baltimore, USA.

Adrienne Kane's most recent book, Cooking and Screaming, was published in February 2009 by Simon & Schuster. She is also the author and photographer of the popular food blog Nosheteria.com, which has a permanent link on Huffington Post. Adrienne's work as a food writer, recipe developer, and food photographer has appeared in Natural Health, Chow, and Digs, and on FoodandWine.com. Her personal essay, "Bring Tenacity to a Boil: Then Serve" is featured in Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All. She currently lives and cooks in New Haven, CT.

October 20: Debby Applegate and Adam Braver

Debby Applegate’s first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, was the product of 20 years of research. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was widely acclaimed as one of the best books of 2006.
Debby holds degrees from Amherst and Yale and has taught at Yale and Wesleyan Universities. She currently teaches a master class on writing biography and memoir at the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She lives in New Haven with her husband, the business writer Bruce Tulgan, and serves on the governing boards of the New Haven Review, the Yale Summer Cabaret and the Friends of the Amherst College Library. Debby is currently researching a cultural biography of Polly Adler, Manhattan's most infamous madam from the 1920s through the 1940s, and whose 1953 autobiography, A House is Not a Home, became a best-selling book and a Hollywood film starring Shelley Winters.

Adam Braver is the author of Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, Divine Sarah, Crows Over the Wheatfield, and November 22, 1963. His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Border’s Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list; and have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and French. His work has appeared in journals such as Daedalus, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Water-Stone Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, West Branch, and Post Road. He is on the faculty and writer-in-residence at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. He also teaches in the Stonecoast MFA, and at the NY State Summer Writers Institute.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Fall 2009 Schedule

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is back for its 2009-2010 season! Join us on orindary evenings - Tuesday nights - at 7 PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven)for readings from a variety of writers.

Our season begins on September 15th with the exciting new novelists Eugenia Kim and Tim Parrish.

We then present:
October 20: Debby Applegate and Adam Braver,
November 17: Susan McCallum Smith and Adrienne Kane,
December 15: April Bernard and Jude Stewart.

If you wish to join our email list, send a note to news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com.

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Please join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

September 15: Eugenia Kim and Tim Parrish

Eugenia Kim is the daughter of Korean immigrant parents who came to America shortly after the Pacific War. She has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings, and is an MFA graduate of Bennington College. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and son. The Calligrapher’s Daughter is her first novel.

Tim Parrish is author of Red Stick Men , a collection of stories set in and around his hometown of Baton Rouge. His most recent fiction and nonfiction appear in Cincinnati Review, Idaho Review, Hotel Amerika, and in the anthologies Alive and Awake in the Pelican State (LSU Press) and Louisiana in Words (Pelican Press). He has a story and an essay forthcoming in Maanha, an upcoming on-line journal of North American and Iranian writers. He is currently at work on a memoir, entitled Southern Man, about being raised a racist, fundamentalist Southern Baptist and subsequently becoming involved in street and race violence. He has received a Gerald E. Freund Grant-in-Aid from the Whiting Foundation due to a nomination by the late Ted Solotaroff and has received fellowships through the Connecticut Arts Council and Sewanee Writers Conference. He teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative-writing programs at Southern Connecticut State University.

May 19th: Major Jackson and Lynne Sharon Schwarz

Major Jackson's books of poems are Hoops (2006, Norton) and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press). He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Poetry, and other literary magazines. Hoops was selected as a finalist for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. His third volume of poetry Holding Company is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He took a B.A. from Temple University and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. Mr. Jackson has worked as the curator of literary arts at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia and the Mountain Writers' Center in Portland, and has taught at Columbia University, Xavier University of Louisiana, New York University, and University of Massachusetts - Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence. He lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.


Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s most recent book is the memoir, Not Now, Voyager, just out from Counterpoint. Among her 21 books are the novels The Writing on the Wall; In the Family Way, Disturbances in the Field; Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award) and Rough Strife (nominated for a National Book Award). She is also the author of the poetry collection, In Solitary; the memoir, Ruined by Reading, and, most recently, she edited The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, a collection of essays and interviews. Her work has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Essays, and many other anthologies, and her reviews have appeared in leading magazines and newspapers. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Spring 2009 Ordinary Evening Reading Series Schedule

For Spring 2009, the Ordinary Evening Reading Series is thrilled to present an array of extra-ordinary writers reading on an ordinary Tuesday night at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven).

January 20: Mark Oppenheimer and Barry McCrea
February 17: Susan Holahan and Lewis Robinson
March 24: Douglas Bauer and Lisa Starr
April 21: Ann Hood and Randall Peffer
May 19: Major Jackson and Lynne Sharon Schwarz

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. We hope you can join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

April 21: Randall Peffer and Ann Hood

Ann Hood is the author, most recently, of the novel The Knitting Circle and the forthcoming memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Bon Appetit, Traveler, and many more publications. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, The Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award.

Randall Peffer has written extensively in genres ranging from nonfiction, travel, and memoir through naval fiction and literary detective novels. His most recent work, Bangkok Dragons, Cape Cod Tears, is the fourth installment of the Cape Islands Mystery series, and in November, he introduced a Civil War naval trilogy with Southern Seahawk. His first publication, Watermen, which described the lives of Chesapeake Bay fishermen, won the Baltimore Sun's Critic's Choice award and was Maryland Book of the Year in 1985. Provincetown Follies/Bangkok Blues, the first of the Cape Islands Mystery series, was a finalist for the Lambda Award. His travel pieces appear in most major metro daily papers, and in magazines like National Geographic, Smithsonian, Reader's Digest, Travel Holiday, Islands, and Sail.

Randy captained the research schooner Sarah Abbot for 14 years, and has also worked as a commercial fisherman. Currently, he teaches literature and writing at Phillips Academy/Andover.

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Takes a Summer Break, Returns September 15

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is on Summer Vacation! The 2009-2010 season will begin on September 15th with readers including the exciting new novelist Eugenia Kim, short-story writer Susan McCallum-Smith, poet April Bernard, and many other writers who will move, delight, and entertain you. If you wish to join our email list, send a note to news.ordinaryevening@gmail.com.

As in the past, our events will occur on Tuesday nights at 7PM in the Mermaid Room at the Anchor Bar & Restaurant (272 College Street, New Haven).

We welcome drinkers and teetotallers alike for an evening of readings by writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. We hope you can join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

March 24: Doug Bauer and Lisa Starr

Douglas Bauer’s books include the novels, Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans, and the non-fiction books, Prairie City, Iowa and The Stuff of Fiction. He’s also edited two anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite Television Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. His stories and essays have been appeared in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, Tin House, Agni, and many other magazines. He’s received grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Massachusetts Arts Council.

Doug previously worked as a magazine editor and for several years as a free-lance magazine writer. Since 2004, he’s been a professor of English at Bennington College and, starting in 1994, a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Boston with his wife and their two dogs.

Lisa Starr’s latest collection of poems is Mad with Yellow, which was just published. Rhode Island’s poet laureate, she moved to Block Island in 1986 and never wanted to leave. With her husband, Champlin, and their children Orrin and Camille, Lisa owns and operates the Hygeia House. Lisa is a two-time Rhode Island poetry fellowship winner, a basketball coach, and a former college instructor and waitress. Her two previous collections are Days of Dogs and Driftwood (1993) and This Place Here (2001), and her individual works have appeared in journals and publications around the country. Lisa is the founder and director of the Block Island Poetry Project.

February 17: Susan Holahan and Lewis Robinson

Susan Holahan came to New Haven to study, and stayed. She took a few degrees from Yale then worked as a teacher, a lawyer, a restaurant reviewer, and a newspaper editor as well as a single parent. Her first book of poetry, Sister Betty Reads the Whole You, won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. It bears her photograph of a Whalley Avenue gas station on the cover. She's had poems in American Letters & Commentary, Crazyhorse, Jubilat, The Prose Poem, Sentence, Volt, and many other magazines, as well as The Starving Poets' Cookbook and Off the Record, an anthology of poems by lawyers.

Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories, winnerof a Whiting Award and the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award, and WaterDogs, due out from Random House in January 2009. A graduate of the IowaWriters' Workshop, he teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at theUniversity of Southern Maine and coaches middle-school basketball inPortland, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and dog.