Artwork © Joe Tsambiras
The Letters Festival believes in the power of independent literature and is committed to increasing its role in Atlanta’s rich artistic culture. The Letters Festival is a program of Lostintheletters, an Atlanta-based literary organization which also hosts an award-winning reading series and will soon unveil quarterly writing workshops.
Jason Koo is the author of two collections of poetry, America's Favorite Poem (C&R Press, 2014) and Man on Extremely Small Island (C&R Press, 2009), winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize and the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award for the best Asian American book of 2009. He has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including the Yale Review, North American Review and Missouri Review, and won fellowships for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute. An assistant professor of English at Quinnipiac University, Koo is also the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets, a nonprofit organization celebrating and cultivating the poets, poetry and literary heritage of Brooklyn, where he lives.
Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Daddy's (featherproof) and DON'T KISS ME (FSG Originals). Her first novel, Ugly Girls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is out November 4th, 2014.
Jamie Iredell is the author of, most recently, I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. His writing has appeared in many literary magazines, among them PANK, Gigantic, and The Chattahoochee Review. He lives in Atlanta where he teaches creative writing to college students.
CA Conrad is the author of seven books including ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON (WAVE Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (WAVE Books, 2010). A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.
Morgan Parker's first collection of poems, Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, was selected by Eileen Myles for The 2013 Gatewood Prize and is forthcoming from Switchback Books in 2015. Recent poems are forthcoming from Tin House, jubilat, and Forklift, Ohio. A graduate of NYU's Creative Writing MFA program and a Cave Canem fellow, Morgan lives in Brooklyn with her dog Braeburn. She works as a poetry editor for Coconut Magazine and Education Director at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA).
Kate Sweeney lives in Atlanta where she writes and creates public radio stories. While pursuing her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she spent time with obit writers, funeral directors and ordinary Americans who found themselves involved with death and memorialization. The result is the popular nonfiction book, American Afterlife (University of Georgia Press). About American Afterlife, Paste Magazine wrote, “Sweeney writes the perfect story for our time, in the best possible way,†and bestselling author Thomas Lynch calls the book “a reliable witness and well-wrought litany to last things and final details.â€
Kate’s radio stories appear regularly on Atlanta’s NPR station, WABE 90.1 FM, and she has won four Edward R. Murrow awards as well as a number of Associated Press awards for her work. Her writing has appeared several times in Oxford American Magazine, as well as Utne Reader Online, Atlanta Magazine, and New South, among other outlets. She is curator of the popular bimonthly nonfiction reading series, True Story, which Atlanta Magazine voted a Best Literary Event of 2012. Photograph of author by Kaylinn Gilstrap Photography.
Jessica Lee Richardson’s short story collection, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from Fc2 this fall. Stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Atlas Review, Caketrain, Hobart, Indiana Review, Joyland, [PANK] and other places.
Esther Lee is the author of the poetry collection, Spit, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize, and the chapbook, Blank Missives, by Trafficker Press. Her writing, visual art, collaborations, and book arts projects have appeared in Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Born Magazine, and elsewhere.
She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University where she served as Editor-in-Chief for Indiana Review. She has been awarded the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, the Utah Writer’s Contest Award for Poetry (selected by Brenda Shaughnessy), the Snowcroft Prose Prize (selected by Susan Steinberg), as well as twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She recently received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah. A Kundiman Fellow, she teaches as an assistant professor at Agnes Scott College.
Aaron Burch is the author of BACKSWING (short stories, Queen's Ferry Press, 2014) and the editor of HOBART: another literary journal.
Gina Abelkop is the author of, I Eat Cannibals, (forthcoming from coimpress, 2014), Darling Beastlettes (Apostrophe Books, 2012) and Trollops in Love (Dancing Girl Press, 2011); founder/editor of Bird of Lace, a feminist press.
Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and writer from Kentucky. She is the author of Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014). Her short story collection was a finalist for both the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (2012) and the Iowa Short Fiction Award (2012). Her short story "Whiskey & Ribbons" won Editor's Choice in Carve Magazine's Raymond Carver Short Story Contest (2011) and was listed as a notable story for storySouth's Million Writers Award. Her work has appeared in places like SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, Little Fiction, Longform Fiction, Carve Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Pithead Chapel, Gigantic Sequins, Folio, Midwestern Gothic, Juked, NANO Fiction, Word Riot, Sundog Lit, and many others. She and her husband Loran run a literary magazine called WhiskeyPaper.
Lauren Watel's short fiction was awarded the 2012 Mississippi Review Prize, the 2012 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest 2nd place prize, and the 2005 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets and Writers. Stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Colorado Review, Mississippi Review, Moment Magazine, and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Her poetry and translations have been published in Slate, TriQuarterly, Five Points, Poetry International, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Collected Poems of Marcel Proust, and the anthology One for the Money
Amy McDaniel runs 421 Atlanta, a center of literary attention and chapbook press. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Tin House, PANK, The Agriculture Reader, Saveur, H_NGM_N, and elsewhere. She also edits EAT GENIUS, the annual food edition of the online literary journal Everyday Genius. Her most recent chapbook is Collected Adult Lessons.
Adam Robinson runs Publishing Genius, an award-winning small press, and works as a publishing consultant. He has taught publishing courses in the MFA program at University of Baltimore and his first book, Adam Robinson and Other Poems, was nominated for the Goodreads Poetry Award. He self-published his second book, Say Poem, in 2010. He is also the editor of Our Primary Focus, an e-book about small press culture as described in interviews with writers, book sellers and publishers.
Chapman received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her novella Bell and Bargain will be published by Rose Metal Press in November, 2014 as part of the collection My Very End of the Universe. Her short fiction has appeared a number of journals including Wigleaf, The Collagist, Elimae, and the anthology The Way We Sleep. She is prose editor for decomP magazine, and lives in Durham, NC.
Bruce Covey's sixth book of poetry, Change Machine, was published by Noemi Press in 2014. He lives in Atlanta, GA, where he edits Coconut magazine and Coconut Books.
¡OOMPH! is a work in translation; a work in transition; a work in extension; a work in exchange; a work in expansion of contemporary poetry and prose. We aim to connect writers around the globe. We consider ourselves a transnational literary journal. We aim to improve our aim the further away we aim. ¡OOMPH! is currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Juan Salzano (Buenos Aires, 1980) is a poet, performance artist, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. He has published the following books of poetry: Muletología (Tsé-Tsé, 2006); ¡Afrodictum! (La propia cartonera, 2010) and Ameba maga (2.0.1.3. editorial, Mexico City, 2014). He did the selection and introduction of the book, Nosotros, los brujos. Apuntes de arte, poesía y brujería (Buenos Aires, Santiago Arcos, 2008); as well as the selection, translation and introduction of the book: Deleuze y la brujería, Buenos Aires, Las Cuarenta, 2009. Additionally, he has a forthcoming book of essays: La experiencia nebular (Santiago de Chile, 2015), and currently, he is working on the Spanish translation and introduction of the book: The Hermetic Deleuze. Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, from philosopher Joshua Ramey. He has been a member of the experimentation group Estación Orbital Alógena since 2004, and of the performance collective Frente Dionisíaco Pyra, since 2005.
Daniela Regert (Buenos Aires, 1990) is a writer and theatrical director. She participated in the Slams de Poesía Oral in 2012 and 2013, and in 2013, won the Slam de la copa FILBA (Feria del Libro). In October of 2014, Nulú Bonsai published her first book, Lapsus Linguae. She studied Stage Management at the Instituto Universario Nacional de Arte, and this year, she presented her first theatrical production of Alberto Rojas Apel's text, Globo flotando contra el techo de un shopping (Floating balloon against the roof of a shopping mall).
Photo © Gail Des Jardin
Funding for this program is provided by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners under the guidance of the Fulton County Arts Council.
