December 16th: Charles Barber and Patricia Volk

Charles Barber is the author of Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (coming out in paperback in February 2009) and the memoir, Songs from the Black Chair. He was educated at Harvard and Columbia and worked for ten years in New York City shelters for the homeless mentally ill. The title essay of Songs from the Black Chair won a 2006 Pushcart Prize and the book itself received a Connecticut Book Award in 2006. Comfortably Numb was released in 2008 to national media attention, including appearances on The Early Show and Fresh Air. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, and Scientific American Mind, among other publications, and on NPR. He has taught nonfiction writing at Wesleyan University. He is a senior administrator at The Connection, an innovative social services agency, and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

Patricia Volk's most recent work is the novel, To My Dearest Friends. She has also written the memoir Stuffed, a novel White Light, and two collections of short stories, All It Takes and The Yellow Banana. She has published stories, book reviews, and essays in dozens of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York, The New Yorker, Playboy, and GQ. She was a weekly columnist for New York Newsday, and lives in New York City.

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.