Description:

Please join us for the next installment of Northwestern University's MA / MFA Program's Spring Graduate & Faculty reading at The Book Cellar (4736 N. Lincoln Ave, Chicago) featuring:

Recent Graduates:

Cathy Beres describes herself as a late bloomer. She began graduate school at Northwestern at the tender age of 58, finishing several years later with a Masters degree in Creative Writing, Nonfiction. Retired from a lengthy career in advertising/marketing, Cathy teaches yoga, is a golf enthusiast, world traveler and writer. She has been published in New City Chicago, literary journals, and yoga publications. Her work has received recognition in numerous writing contests.

Born and raised in Guadeloupe (French West Indies), J-L Deher-Lesaint has lived in the United States since 1995. He holds degrees from Harold Washington College, Loyola University Chicago, the University of Virginia and Northwestern University. His feature interviews with acclaimed authors Edmund White and Edward P. Jones have appeared in Meridian, where he served as fiction editor, and his book reviews have appeared in New City and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has taught at Harold Washington College since 2004, and currently serves as Co-Chairperson for the English, Speech, Theatre and Journalism Department.

Virginia Smith Rice is the author of the poetry collection, When I Wake It Will Be Forever, published by Sundress Publications in 2014, and a chapbook of poems, Whose House, Whose Playroom, newly released by Dancing Girl Press. Her poems appear in The Antioch Review, Baltimore Review, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. She is poetry editor at Kettle Blue Review and associate editor at Canopic Publishing. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where she received the Distinguished Thesis Award for her poetry manuscript, One Voice May Survive The Other.

Creative Writing Faculty:

Juan Martinez was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada before moving to Chicago. He’s an assistant professor at Northwestern University, and his work and has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. Small Beer Press released Best Worst American, his story collection, in February 2017. Visit and say hi at http://fulmerford.com

Christine Sneed’s most recent book is the story collection The Virginity of Famous Men. Her other books are the novels Little Known Facts and Paris, He Said, and a second story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry. She’s won a Grace Paley Prize in short fiction, has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and has had stories anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and New Stories from the Midwest. She lives in Evanston and is the faculty director of the Master’s in Creative Writing program at Northwestern University.