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We have two reading series!
The House Party Reading Series
a salon-style reading
Hosted in Hillsborough and 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.
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.
Join the mailing list to receive an invitation: https://bullcitypress.com/reading-series/join-the-mailing-list/
Upcoming Readings
September 23 at 8:00 pm: Katie Condon & Angela Velez with Siew David Hii
Mettlesome Theater in Golden Belt, 800 Taylor Street, Suite 9-156, Durham
Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked, winner of The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. Her recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from the New Yorker, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ anthology 100 Poems That Matter. Katie is an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University.
Siew David Hii was born in Mobile, Alabama. They now live in Raleigh, North Carolina. (photo credit: Marcus Jackson)
Angela Velez grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, under the watchful eye of her Peruvian immigrant parents. She earned her bachelor of arts from Columbia University and her master of fine arts from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Durham, with her piles of books, three plastic flamingos, and one wobbly disco ball. Lulu and Milagro’s Search for Clarity is her first novel. You can visit her online at www.angelavelez.com.
October 28 at 8:00 pm: Dilruba Ahmed & Junious Ward with Elizabeth Otylia
Mettlesome Theater in Golden Belt, 800 Taylor Street, Suite 9-156, Durham
Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (Red Hen), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She has taught with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, Swarthmore College, and in workshops across the U.S. In January 2021, Ahmed joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.
Elizabeth Otylia is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, she studies English and Women’s & Gender Studies. She received the university’s 2023 Blanche Armfield Prize in Poetry.
Junious ‘Jay’ Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), and the author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press, 2020) and Composition ( Button Poetry, 2022). Jay currently serves as a Program Director for BreatheInk, where he facilitates writing and performance workshops and coaches youth poets attending Brave New Voices each year. He serves as vice-chair for the board of The Watering Hole, a non-profit organization that aims to nurture writers of color in the Southern tradition. He also serves on several curatorial committees related to the arts in Charlotte. His work can be found in Crabfat Magazine, Lackadaisy Lit Mag, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and on Button Poetry.
November 25 at 8:00 pm: Scott Gould
Mettlesome Theater in Golden Belt, 800 Taylor Street, Suite 9-156, Durham
Scott Gould was born, raised and still lives in South Carolina. His first book, Strangers to Temptation—a linked story collection the Atlanta Journal Constitution called “a compulsive read” and Foreword Reviews dubbed “funny, often poignant, and not easily forgotten”—was published by Hub City Press in 2017. Of his debut novel, Whereabouts (Koehler Books), the Atlanta Journal Constitution said, the book is “distinctly Southern but gritty, without a whiff of moonlight and magnolias.” Gould’s memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly (Vine Leaves Press), was released in March of 2021, and a new novel, The Hammerhead Chronicles, will be published by the University of North Georgia Press in early 2022. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Kenyon Review, New Stories from the South, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse and The Bitter Southerner, among others. He is a two-time winner of the S.C. Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose and the S.C. Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina with a cat and a dog, and teaches creative writing at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities. He is always pulling for the Braves.