top of page

October Reading Moves to Monday


We welcome Christopher Barzak and Lawrence Coates to our October First Monday reading, Monday October 3 @ 7:00, Suzie’s Dogs & Drafts, 34 N. Phelps St. Free parking on the street and in the lot behind the Voinovich Building on the corner of Hazel & Commerce. An open mic will follow, emceed by fiction writer Bill Soldan. Open mic readers are invited to the stage for 5 min.– to read their own work, or a writer’s they admire.

From 6:30 to 9:00, 10% of all food sales will benefit the YSU Student Literary Arts Association.



Come early to get a seat. We expect a packed house! From 6:00 to 9:30, a restaurant takeover will kick back 10% of food sales to the Student Literary Arts Association.

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow, which has been made into the Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His most recent novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, was published by Knopf in 2015, and received the Stonewall Honor Award from the American Library Association. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories, and Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies, which won Best Collection in the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards.

Christopher grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.


novel-cover

Lawrence Coates grew up in El Cerrito, California.  He spent four years as a Quartermaster in the Coast Guard, and four more years in the Merchant Marine, working as an Able-bodied Seaman and Third Mate.  During his time at sea, he sailed in the North Atlantic, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean, and he served aboard a fleet oiler in the Arabian Sea during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.  He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz and gained fluency in Spanish while studying abroad in Barcelona, Spain. He also worked for a brief period as a freelance journalist, placing a cover story about the U.S.-Mexican border in the Sunday supplement of The Chicago Tribune.  After completing a master’s degree at Berkeley, he taught for a year in the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris and then went on to earn his doctorate at the University of Utah.

His first novel, The Blossom Festival, won the Western States Book Award for Fiction and was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Series. His second novel, The Master of Monterey, was published in 2003, and his third novel, The Garden of the World, was published in 2012 and won the Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association of Ohio.  In 2015, he published The Goodbye House, a novel set amid the housing tracts of San José in the aftermath of the first dot com bust and the attacks of 9/11.  Also in 2015, he published a novella, Camp Olvido, set in a labor camp in California’s Great Central Valley.

His work has been recognized with the Donald Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, the Miami University Press Novella Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction.  He is currently a professor of creative writing at Bowling Green State University.

0 views
bottom of page