Dire Literary Series with Alden Jones, Louie Cronin and Georgia Park

Alden Jones is the author of The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia, which was named a Top Ten Travel Book by Publishers Weekly and the Huffington Post, won the Independent Publishers Book Award in Travel Essays and the Foreword Reviews IndieFab Book of the Year in Travel Essays, and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Her story collection, Unaccompanied Minors, won the New American Fiction Prize, the Lascaux Book Prize, and an Independent Publisher Book Award in Short Fiction, and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award in Debut Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award.

Alden has lived, worked, and traveled in over forty countries, including as a WorldTeach volunteer in Costa Rica, a program director in Cuba, and a professor on Semester at Sea. She is the cofounder, with Tim Weed, of the Cuba Writers Program, which launched in May 2016. She teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston.

Louie Cronin, author of the novel Everyone Loves You Back, is a writer, radio producer, and audio engineer. For ten years she worked as a producer/writer for Car Talk on NPR. A graduate of Boston University’s Master’s program in Creative Writing and a past winner of the Ivan Gold Fiction Fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston, Louie’s fiction and essays have been published in Compass Rose, The Princeton Arts Review, Long Island Newsday, The Boston Globe Magazine, and on PRI.org.

Her short stories have been finalists for both Glimmer Train and New Millennium Writings awards. Louie has been awarded residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Currently she works as a technical director for PRI’s The World and lives in Boston with her husband, the sculptor James Wright.

Georgia Park is creator of Private Bad Thoughts, curator of Whisper and the Roar a feminist literary collective, and a writer for Sudden Denouement. She is a wonderful poet with an enormous heart and the author of Quit Your Job and Become a Poet.