The Loudest Voice 11/13/2008

The Loudest Voice announces its victorious return on Thursday, November 13th.

Join us for literature, fun, and drink at The Mountain Bar, located in Chinatown in downtown L.A. Reading starts promptly at 7PM. Doors open at 6PM.

We'll be featuring fiction and poetry from five unparalleled, inimitable and ultra-talented writers.

DANA JOHNSON is a native of Los Angeles and the author of BREAK ANY WOMAN DOWN, which was published in Fall 2001 by the University of Georgia Press , and which was a finalist for the first annual Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Patterson Fiction Prize, and was the recipient of the 2000 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her other books include FLYOVER STATES and the forthcoming EYE TO EYE. Her short stories have appeared in Missouri Review, American Literary Review, Ninth Letter, and Mosaic, among other journals, and in the anthologies SHAKING THE TREE: A COLLECTION OF FICTION AND MEMOIR BY BLACK WOMEN (W. W. Norton) and THE DICTIONARY OF FAILED RELATIONSHIPS: 26 STORIES OF LOVE GONE WRONG (Three Rivers Press). She currently teaches in the literature and creative writing program at USC.

MICHAEL BUSK was born Catholic and Pentecostal in northern Indiana during the tail end of the first Reagan Administration. The seventh of eight high-octane siblings, he attended Notre Dame, where he wrote too much and drank too little, but at least had the comfort of returning home every night to Knute Rockne's old house, which was later occupied by Flannery O'Connor's fiancé. Although the forward pass was perfected in his backyard, he still believes a solid running game is the key to a successful offense. After graduating, he completed a master's at the University of Nebraska, where he survived homicidal neighbors and Willa Cather winters, and had a long chat with Gillian Welch at a pizza bar. Two summers ago he played on a barnstorming baseball team that toured rural Nebraska in an un-airconditioned 1977 Toyota Dolphin camper, a period during which he subsisted off of hot dogs, Snickers bars, and High Life He spent the past year in South Bend, where he divided his time between writing and playing bridge with his grandparents. His fictional interests include: wine snobs, savant children, high-energy particle physics, fertility cults, the undead, Young Republicans, football, phrenology, Bono, Bob Costas, crucifixion, 50s housewives, rock and roll, the Resurrection of the Dead, and the end of the world. He's glad to be here.

SABA RAZVI holds a BA in English from Creighton University and MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin.She has received a James A. Michener Fellowship, and a frst place Fania Kruger fellowship, and a Virginia C. Middleton Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Diner, Karamu, Anthology, The Homestead Review, and, most recently, in Voiecs of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

JOSIE SIGLER'S work has appeared in The Journal of American Poetry, Poet Lore, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Harpur Palate and others. She was a 2007 finalist for The Iowa Award in Fiction. She calls Mount Desert Island, in Maine, home, but part of her is undoubtedly stranded for life in any number of rustbelt towns surrounded by endless corn. She's attempted in her work, as Dorothy Allison says, to "Give some child, some thirteen-year-old, the hope of the remade life," to nourish the covenant of truth that's sustained her thus far.

RYAN SHOEMAKER graduated with a BA and MA in English from Brigham Young University, and currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Jennifer, and two children, Kieran and Haven. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the MacGuffin, Wanderings, and Dialogue. Much of his fiction deals with the inner-city as a kind of frontier where people of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities meet, often violently, and see each other for the first time. Presently, he is a first year Ph.D. student in the University of Southern California's Literature and Creative Writing program.