Saturday 1/9: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Megan Milks, M. Shelly Conner

we invite you to our first event:

SATURDAY
January 9, 2010
7 p.m. at Las Manos Gallery
(5220 N Clark St)

MECCA JAMILAH SULLIVAN is from Harlem, New York. Her fiction has appeared and is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Best New Writing, Bloom, Philadelphia Stories, Lumina, Baby Remember My Name, X-24: Unclassified, Woman's Work, Homeboy Review, and Baobab South African Journal of New Writing, as well as literary publications from Columbia, Yale, Temple, and Howard Universities. She was awarded the Smith-Shonubi Scholarship in fiction. She holds a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation focuses on the relationships between genre, form, and identity in contemporary black women's writing. Mecca is also working on her first novel, tentatively titled She Woke Up With the Words in Her Mouth.

MEGAN MILKS is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in the anthologies Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire; Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Writing by Contemporary Women Writers; The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing; and 30 Under 30. Stories are published or about to be in DIAGRAM, Sidebrow, Mad Hatters Review, Pocket Myths: The Odyssey, Wigleaf, and The Wild. Her short story "Kill Marguerite" was published in May by Another New Calligraphy. She co-edits Mildred Pierce Magazine.

M. SHELLY CONNER is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her comedy sketches have been produced by Second City Chicago and the 2007 Black Playwrights Festival hosted by the Black Ensemble Theater. Her article, "First Wave Feminist Struggles in Contemporary Black Motorcycle Clubs" was published in the Fall 2009 issue of the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies (IJMS). She is currently working on a novel that explores issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in three generations of an African American family.

FREE! BYOB