October 1, 2009: TLV "The First of Fall"

Bring your friends, your enemies, and your frenemies!

Please join us for the first Loudest Voice reading of Fall, 2009, a night that's set to unite writers from both sides of the aisle in a gesture of profound empathy and youthful excitement.

Featuring poetry and fiction by a fantastic lineup up of new and returning writers in the USC PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program:

Mark Irwin
Jessica Piazza
Jackson Bliss
Lisa Locascio

Including music by the elusive Henry Wolfe Gummer!

Details: Thursday, October 1, 2009, 7:00 -- 9:00 PM
The Mountain Bar
475 Gin Ling Way
Los Angeles, CA

We hope to see you there,
The Loudest Voice Crew

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BIOS:

Hailing from Chicago, Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2007 Sparks Prize in Fiction. Having lived in Seattle, Portland, New York, West Africa and Argentina, Jackson is a travel junkie, crossing lines of longitude whenever he can, both in his writing and in coach. Armed with a MFA
from the University of Notre Dame and a nasty obsession for college football, Jackson is now a PhD student in literature and creative writing at SC (holla). He has work published in: the Kenyon Review, Notre Dame Review, Connecticut Review, African American Review, Stand Magazine in the UK, South Loop Review, Writers Post Journal, Ink Collective, Pittsburgh Quarterly, 3:am Magazine, Word Riot, Fringe
Magazine, DJ Booth, and the Denver Syntax, among others.

Lisa Locascio was born in 1984 and raised in River Forest, Illinois. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University and is currently Virginia B. Middleton fellow at the University of Southern California’s
PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing. She has recently completed her first novel, Peculiar Qualifications, a narrative about desire and alienation set in the suburbs of Chicago. Lisa’s writing has appeared in The Northwest Review, Joyland Chicago, Fifth Wednesday Journal, The Minetta Review, Prairie Margins, and Lake Affect.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Jessica Piazza now lives in Los Angeles while pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is Founding Editor of Bat City Review, and her poems have most recently appeared in 42 Opus, Barrelhouse, Barefoot Muse, No Tell Motel, Rattle and Pebble Lake Review. Her most recent projects include a series of short stories in verse, and a book of personal essays (thankfully, not in verse.)

Mark Irwin was born in Faribault, Minnesota, and has lived throughout the United States and abroad in France and Italy. His poetry and essays have appeared widely in many literary magazines including Antaeus, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, and the New Republic. He has taught at a number of universities and colleges including Case Western Reserve, the University of Iowa, Ohio University, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado/Boulder, the University of Nevada, and Colorado College. The author of six collections of poetry, The Halo of Desire (1987), Against the Meanwhile, Wesleyan University Press (1989), Quick, Now, Always, BOA (1996), White City, BOA (2000), Bright Hunger, BOA (2004), and Tall If, New Issues (2008), he has also translated two volumes of poetry, one from the French and one from the Romanian. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, National
Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado Council for the Arts Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He lives in Colorado, and Los Angeles, where he currently teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California.