Late Night Library's 2014 Annual Battle of the Books is nearly here, and I'm very excited to be co-hosting with Julia Fierro!
Battle of the Books is a bracket-style competition pitting debut books against each other until a champion emerges worthy of the Late Night Library Championship Belt. Published authors and seasoned book industry professionals will take on the challenge of reading selections from another author's debut work. We're featuring some incredible people, so I hope that you'll join us!
September 18, 2014 | 6:30pm | Pacific Standard | 82 Fourth Avenue | Brooklyn, NY
Featuring readings from:
Chloe Benjamin is the author of The Anatomy of Dreams, which has been long-listed for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her writing is published or forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Millions, PANK and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, WI and on the internet.
Josh Booton’s first book, The Union of Geometry & Ash, was published by Bear Star Press in 2013. He is the recipient of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and the Keene Prize in Literature, as well as three grants from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation.
Sean Davis is a writer and artist. He is also a Purple Heart recipient and Iraq War veteran. His art hangs in the heart of the Alberta Arts District in Portland, Oregon. His words have appeared in numerous publications. His memoir, The Wax Bullet War, is out in bookstores now.
Justin St. Germain is the author of Son of a Gun: a memoir, which won the 2013 Barnes & Noble Discover Award in Nonfiction. He lives in the Twin Cities.
Adrianne Harun’s most recent book is a novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain. Her stories have been published widely and listed as notable in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
Jamaal May is the author of Hum (AJB), recipient of the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Silver Medal, and an NAACP Image Award nomination. In 2014 he received a dozen honors including a Pushcart Prize and Kenyon Review Fellowship. Jamaal co-directs OW! Arts with Tarfia Faizullah.
Maria Mutch is the author of Know the Night, a memoir about a boy who doesn't speak, a 1930s polar adventure and jazz, published by Simon & Schuster. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Guernica, Necessary Fiction, Fiction Writers Review, Bayou Magazine and Literary Mama, among others.
Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, One Story, Five Chapters, Gulf Coast, The Millions, and elsewhere, and has won the Pushcart Prize. To learn more about her, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing).
Read by:
Robin Black is the author of the story collection If I loved you, I would tell you this which was a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Prize; as well as the critically acclaimed novel Life Drawing, which is long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. 
Scott Cheshire received his MFA from Hunter College, and teaches writing for The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop. He is the author of High as the Horses' Bridles, his first novel. He lives in New York City.
Chelsea Drake graduated with a B.A. in journalism and creative writing from Fredonia, where she was a recipient of the Mary Louise White Fiction Award. Her work has been published in Buffalo Spree Magazine and Rhode Island Monthly. She works at a literary agency and writes both fiction and nonfiction.
Kelli Dunham is the genderqueer nurse-comic-author-ex-nun hybrid so common in modern Brooklyn. She is also an RN and the author of five books of humorous non-fiction, including two children’s books being used by Sonlight conservative home schooling association in their science curriculum.
Mira Jacob is the author of the novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random House). She is the co-founder of the much-loved Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to the city’s sweetest stage. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.
Kate Racculia is a writer living in Bethlehem, PA. She is the author of two novels, Bellweather Rhapsody, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2014, and This Must Be the Place, published in 2010 by Henry Holt & Company. She has her MFA from Emerson College, has taught novel writing at GrubStreet in Boston, and posts many pictures of her cat on the Internet.
Mike Scalise’s work has appeared in Agni, Indiewire, Ninth Letter, Paris Review, Wall Street Journal, and other places. He’s an 826DC advisory board member, has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and the Ucross Foundation, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University.
Clifford Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays. His essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Commonweal, and elsewhere. He is the author of a novel, Signifying Nothing (2009), and a memoir, Twin of Blackness, scheduled for 2015.
