New York Writers Workshop: A Reading at The Red Room with Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Roberta Allen, and Tim Tomlinson

• Books & Literature

Come to a reading at The Red Room*, just one flight above the KGB Bar, presented by New York Writers Workshop. New York Writers Workshop is privileged to have Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, now teaching at Penn State University’s Altoona campus, share her poems, and pleased to have Ali Cobby Eckermann, who has come all the way from Australia, read with us at the Red Room. We are also happy to have New Yorker Roberta Allen, famed for writing and teaching flash fiction, reading from her collection of short stories. And last but not least, Brooklyn resident and New York Writers Workshop co-founder Tim Tomlinson will be reading from his new book, This is Not Happening to You, launching this October.

Ali Cobby Eckermann Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is the author of seven books, including the verse novel Ruby Moonlight, the poetry collection Inside My Mother, and the memoir Too Afraid to Cry. In 2017 she was awarded Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize in Poetry.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Liberian civil war survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1991 during the fourteen year Liberian civil war. She is the author of five books of poetry: When the Wanderers Come Home, (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Where the Road Turns (Autumn House Press, 2010), The River is Rising (Autumn House Press, 2007), Becoming Ebony, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003) and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues Press, 1998). She is also the author of a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea, (One Moore Books, 2012) Her poem, “One Day: Love Song for Divorced Women” was selected by US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, as an American Life in Poetry June 13, 2011 featured poem. Patricia has won several awards and grants, including a 2016 WISE Women Award from Blair County, Pennsylvania, 2011 President’s Award from the Blair County NAACP, the 2010 Liberian Award for her poetry and her mentorship of young Liberians in the Diaspora, a Penn State University AESEDA Collaborative Grant for her research on Liberian Women’s Trauma stories from the Civil War, a 2002 Crab Orchard Award for her second book of poems, a World Bank Fellowship, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Awards. Her individual poems and memoir articles have been anthologized and published in literary magazines in the US, in South America, Africa and Europe, and her work has been translated in Spanish and Finnish. Patricia holds a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University’s Altoona campus.

A short story writer, novelist and memoirist, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books. Her latest is the story collection The Princess of Herself (Pelekinesis Press). Over 300 of her stories have been published in such magazines as Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail and The Collagist, among many others. She is also a conceptual artist in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum. www.robertaallen.com

Tim Tomlinson is co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He is also the author of Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry), and This Is Not Happening to You (short fiction), which he’ll be launching at tonight’s reading. His work has appeared in Australia, China, Singapore, and the Philippines, and is anthologized in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Long Island Noir, and We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of Softblow. He teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program, NYU.

For more details on this and other classes, pitch conferences and events, visit www.newyorkwritersworkshop.com

The Red Room
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues

FREE

* Because The Red Room is a bar, you must be 21 years of age or older to attend this event, and while there is no cover, there is a two-drink minimum.