The Dire Literary Series is pleased to welcome Kirstin Allio, author of Clothed, Female Figure, J. Mae Barizo, author of The Cumulus Effect, and Maya Pindyck, author of Emoticoncert for a reading from their works.
About the authors:
Kirstin Allio’s novel, Garner, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, a PEN/O. Henry prize, and other honors for her short stories and essays. She has been a Howard Foundation Fellow at Brown University, and she lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.
Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo is the author of The Cumulus Effect. A prize-winning poet, critic and performer, recent work appears in AGNI, Bookforum, Boston Review, Hyperallergic and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bennington College, the New School, the Jerome Foundation and Poets House. Phillip Lopate wrote that Barizo’s “exquisite poems display throughout a mastery of poetic form and a thoroughly professional command of surface and tone. It is clear we are in the hands ofa highly cultivated, intelligent writer.”
A classically-trained musician and a champion of cross-genre work, J. Mae has performed sound/text collaborations with musicians from The National, Bon Iver, and the American String Quartet. As a musician she has performed with Mark Morris Dance Group, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West and Pharrell, among others. She lives in New York City.
Maya Pindyck‘s latest poetry collection, Emoticoncert, was published by Four Way Books in 2016. Her other collections are Friend Among Stones, winner of the Many Voices Project Award from New Rivers Press, and Locket, Master, selected by Paul Muldoon for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She has exhibited her visual and multidisciplinary work widely, most recently in New York City at the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum, Governors Island Art Fair, Chashama Pop Up Space, and Printed Matter. In 2005, she co-founded Project Voice, an ongoing collection of abortion stories. Pindyck’s projects have earned her grants and residencies from the Historic House Trust of NYC, the Abortion Conversation Project, the Rockefeller Estate, the Vermont Studio Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Squaw Valley Writers. She holds her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, her MA in education from Brooklyn College, and her BA in studio art and philosophy from Connecticut College. A doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Teachers College, she currently teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and Long Island University and as a writer-in-residence with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in NYC schools.
