Kick off Pride Weekend with a reading from Jessica Alexander, Vi Khi Nao, Ali Raz and Katie Jean Shinkle

VI KHI NAO is the author of six poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her collaborative work, That Woman Could Be You, with Jessica Alexander arrives in April 2022 from BlazeVOX. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: https://www.vikhinao.com

JESSICA ALEXANDER’S novella, "None of This Is an Invitation" (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. https://www.jessica-alexander.com

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of four novellas and seven chapbooks, most recently None of This is an Invitation (coauthored with Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press at University of South Dakota, forthcoming) and Thick City (Bull City Press, forthcoming). Midwinter Constellation, a collaboration with 31 other women poets written in homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, released in January 2022 from Black Lawrence Press. Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Flaunt Magazine, The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Fugue, Crazyhorse, Witness, South Dakota Review and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Denver, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. A 2021 Lambda Literary fellow, she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM and creative nonfiction editor of the Texas Review. She is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University where she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing program.

Ali Raz’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Firmament, and elsewhere. Her collaborative collection Human Tetris (co-authored with Vi Khi Nao) came out with 11:11 in 2019. Her first novella, Alien, comes out in spring 2022 from 11:11 Press.