Red Emma’s

Rather than judge discomfort, we offer up awkward, cringe, sentimental, and earnest writing as portals into vulnerability, a place for real human connection.

Get ready to groan in recognition of our shared humanity, to giggle with nervous laughter, and whisper as you half cover your eyes to avoid the beautiful trainwreck happening mere feet away.

Our reading invites you to sit in the shared discomfort and feel all the feels.

An off-site event happening in tandem with that big writing conference. An open mic will follow, time permitting.

Readers include: b. al-ism, Jardana Peacock, Chen Chen, Steffan Triplett, Lydi Conklin, Jenny Xie, Kailah Figueroa, Sarah Wang

b. al-ism is a Queer Arab+American writer and educator. His forthcoming memoir, Fabulous: A Story of Family Fracture and Healing, explores his coming of age amid Arab and Muslim values. His work appears in Rusted Radishes _and The Markaz Review as well as the anthologies _The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human, New Moons and El Ghourabaa. His speculative short story set in a post-apocalyptic Gulf, The Runner, won first runner-up in the Barjeel Art Foundation's Mudun Short Story Prize, published by Rusted Radishes. Fellowships and residencies include The Corporation of Yaddo, La Napoule Art Foundation and 100 West – Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency.

Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Emory, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, Headlands, Loghaven, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for _The Believer, Lenny Letter, _and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, _Rainbow Rainbow, _was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, _Songs of No Provenance, _was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Jenny Xie is the author of Holding Pattern, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Time, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, and Electric Literature. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Joyland, Narrative, The Offing, and The Sewanee Review, among other publications. Jenny holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Yaddo, Kundiman, Aspen Words, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Loghaven, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and other organizations. She’s currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

Chen Chen lives in Rochester, New York, and teaches for the MFA program at New England College. He is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by Boa Editions. His latest chapbook is Love That for Us, a collaboration with Sam Herschel Wein, now out from & Change. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry, three editions of The Best American Poetry, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award longlist, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists.

Kailah Figueroa is a rhetorical engineer, memory archivist, and part-time prose stylist. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, wildness, The McNeese Review, Callaloo, Ploughshares, and others. She received her BA in Creative Writing and Publishing and Editing at Susquehanna University and subsequently earned an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark. She has received support and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cave Canem Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, the Fulbright Commission, and Vermont Studio Center. Her biggest dream is for her and all her friends to live on the same street. She is at work on her debut poetry collection.

Jardana Peacock (They/Them) is a queer, nonbinary writer, parent and activist, living in the original homelands of the Shawnee, Cherokee and Osage (Louisville, KY). Their writing has been published in Swamp Pink, The Queer Love Project, Nashville Review, YES! Magazine, and more. Over the past two decades, they have served as a resource mobilizer for liberatory movements, raising millions of dollars for community. Their work primarily supports racial justice organizing, Palestinian liberation, solidarity economy, land back and art and culture. Jardana currently serves as the Senior Director of Development and Communications at Code2040. They are happiest traveling between worlds, in the Appalachian Mountains and swimming in lakes, creeks and oceans. Discover what they are reading and how they are adventuring over on Instagram: @jardana.

Steffan Triplett is a Black, queer writer born and raised in southwest Missouri. He is the author of the hybrid memoir Bad Forecast (Essay Press) and the essay chapbook Constraints (New Michigan Press). His recent essays, poems, and criticism appear in Vulture, Obsidian, Foglifter, Poetry Daily, and It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press). He is the Managing Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh  where he is a Teaching Associate Professor. Triplett has received fellowships and support from Cave Canem, Outpost, Lambda Literary, Callaloo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Blue Mountain Center, and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh.

Sarah Wang is the author of NEW SKIN—a novel about botched plastic surgery, reality TV, undocumented immigrants, and a deranged mother/daughter duo, out this May from Little, Brown—which has received advanced praise from Colm Toibin, Maggie Nelson, Chris Kraus, and Weike Wang. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, NYFA, PEN America Writing for Justice, the Center for Fiction, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, and Ragdale. She is a Kenyon Review Workshop Scholar, a Sewanee Writers' Conference Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, and the winner of a Nelson Algren prize for fiction and a Barbara Deming Award. Her writing appears in The New Yorker; The Atlantic; London Review of Books; The Nation; The New Republic; Harper's Bazaar; n+1; BOMB; Lux Magazine, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and more.