Join us for a new reading series in partnership with Lost City Books. A celebration of DC’s vibrant literary community, the series features talented local and visiting authors alike, all doing exciting work in different genres. We’ll eat, drink, talk, and listen, meet fellow lovers of literature, discover new authors, and mark the changing of the seasons together.
Summer authors: Nina MacLaughlin (essay), Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (fiction), Johannes Lichtman (fiction), Jonny Teklit (poetry)
Refreshments will be provided.
Mezzanine is an ADA-accessible space on the first floor
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Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, a finalist for a LAMBDA Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, as well as Summer Solstice: An Essay. Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and writes a weekly books column for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared on or in the Paris Review Daily, the Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, the New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. is the author of three books: the novel Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel and the Balcones Fiction Prize; Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary; and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA. She has earned honors from Bread Loaf, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Originally from Harlem, NY, Mecca is a Professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC.
Johannes Lichtman’s debut novel, Such Good Work, was chosen as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. His second novel, Calling Ukraine, was named one of the best fiction books of 2023 by Library Journal. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, The Paris Review Daily, Foreign Policy, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, DC.
Jonny Teklit has had work appear in The Academy of American Poets, The New Yorker, Catapult, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
