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We have two reading series!
The House Party Reading Series
a salon-style reading
Hosted at a private residence in Durham, NC, the House Party Reading Series is a chance for writers and readers to hear some of the most exciting voices in contemporary letters… and then have a party. Head chef Ashley Nissler prepares the spread and the Bull City Press gang brings authors from all over the country to read new work.
Join the mailing list to receive an invitation: https://bullcitypress.com/reading-series/join-the-mailing-list/
Bull City Press Presents
Located at Mettlesome Theater (in Golden Belt, 800 Taylor Street, Suite 9-156, Durham, NC, 27701), Bull City Press’s downtown reading series brings you poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from established and emerging writers. And stick around for Golden Age, which generally features one of the readers inspiring improv comedy. Free to the public.
Upcoming Readings
April 27 at 7:30 pm: Su Cho, Anthony Correale, & Matthew Olzmann with Golden Age Comedy
Su Cho is a poet and essayist born in South Korea and raised in Indiana. She is the author of the poetry collection The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin, 2022) which was a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in places like The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2021, and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. Her editorial work includes serving as Guest Editor for Poetry magazine and serving as editor-in-chief of Cream City Review and Indiana Review. She is an assistant professor of English teaching creative writing and poetry at Clemson University.
Anthony Correale holds his BA and MA in English from Humboldt State University, deep in the California redwoods. He received an MFA in fiction at Indiana University and has served as the fiction editor and nonfiction editor at Indiana Review. His work has appeared in Day One. He teaches at Clemson University.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Golden Age is an all-star cast of improvisers, Each night, they welcome one special guest to share art and insights. Their experiences inspired their work, now they inspire hilarious conversation and comedy.
May 25 at 7:30 pm: Cynthia Gunadi & Faith Holsaert with Beni Kroll and Golden Age Comedy
Cynthia Gunadi is the 2023-2024 Beebe Fellow in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College. Her short fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Greensboro Review, and Salt Hill Journal, among other places. She is grateful to have received support from Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, and The Massachusetts Cultural Council. She holds an MFA from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, as well as an M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In a recent past life she practiced and taught architectural design at University of Miami.
Faith S. Holsaert is an activist, poet, and author. She began her life as an activist during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She is the author of two collections of poetry, Year Forever in My Veins and Falls Lake: Swimming in History, and a memoir, Ma Lineal: A Memoir of Race, Activism, and Queer Family, as well as the co-editor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. She was awarded 2019 Alex Albright Prize in Nonfiction. Holsaert received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She resides in Durham, North Carolina, and have twelve grandchildren.
Beni Kroll is a queer poet from Durham, NC and a recent graduate of UNC. He has been awarded honorable mention for the Ann Williams Burrus Prize, and his poems can be found in Cellar Door.
Golden Age is an all-star cast of improvisers, Each night, they welcome one special guest to share art and insights. Their experiences inspired their work, now they inspire hilarious conversation and comedy.
July 27 at 7:30 pm: Jayme Ringleb with TBD and Golden Age Comedy
Jayme Ringleb is a queer writer raised in the southern United States and northern Italy. Jayme’s debut poetry collection, So Tall It Ends in Heaven, is published by Tin House Books. Poems from this collection have appeared recently in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares. Jayme holds a PhD from Florida State University, an MFA from the University of Oregon, and an MBA from the University of Iowa. An endowed chair and assistant professor of English at Meredith College, Jayme lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
October 26 at 8:00 pm (doors at 7:00 pm): Friends of Writers Benefit featuring Sarah Audsley, Rita Banerjee, Megan Pinto, Carter Sickels, & Connie Voisine
Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She is the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center. (photo by Carolyn Kehler)
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and she is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this new memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter from her new memoir, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays.
Megan Pinto’s debut collection, Saints of Little Faith, is forthcoming with Four Way Books in September 2024. The winner of the 2023 Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Megan’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Megan has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Storyknife, The Peace Studio and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. She lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson. (photo by Beowulf Sheehan)
Connie Voisine is the author of The Bower, a book-length poem about her family’s time in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her previous books, Calle Florista, and Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream are also published by University of Chicago Press. Rare High Meadow was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. Her chapbook, And God Created Women, was published by Bull City Press. She has poems published in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her work was featured at The Lab at Belmar, a museum show pairing prehistoric stone tools with poems. Educated at Yale University, University of California at Irvine, and University of Utah, Voisine teaches in the creative writing program at New Mexico State University and lives in New Mexico and Chicago. Voisine was a Fulbright Fellow in the School of English at Queen’s University in 2012.