Students from the Master of Professional Writing graduate program at USC will read their work, joined by USC faculty member and acclaimed poet Amy Gerstler!

This reading's theme is "Road Trip--Get Me Outta Here!" and the student readers are: Erin La Rosa, Sarah Lowe, Justin McFarr, Breene Murphy, and Russell Nakamura. 

Amy Gerstler is a writer of nonfiction, poetry, and journalism whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including the Paris Review, New Yorker, and Best American Poetry. Her book Bitter Angel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is Dearest Creature (Penguin); she also edited the anthology The Best American Poetry 2010 (Scribner).

In honor of what would have been the 100th birthday of playwriting great Tennessee Williams, Skylight Books and the Skylight Theater are celebrating with live performances (in the theater) and a reading from the original play Garden District by Chris Phillips in the bookstore.  Birthday cake will be served!

Performances in the theater begin at 3 p.m. (click here for info). Then the afterparty and reading from Garden District start in the bookstore at 5 p.m.!

About Garden District:

A Streetcar Named Desire. Suddenly Last Summer. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Three classic plays by Tennessee Williams, their plots set in motion by the mysterious, violent deaths of three men who, until now, were never given the chance to tell their stories.

Garden District pulls back the curtain Williams drew on Allan Grey, the shy young man only beginning to grasp the desires inside himself; Sebastian Venable, the doomed aesthete unable to escape his horrific past; and Skipper, the football hero who refuses to give up fighting for the ove of his cowardly best friend, even in the face of a formidable rival. As all three collide with the people around them and the demons that haunt them, we witness firsthand the events that sent them hurtling towards their ultimate fates.

Both a reverent love letter to and a passionate deconstruction of Williams, Garden District thrusts these three previously unseen characters center stage, allowing them to speak for an entire generation hidden in darkness.

University of California, Riverside Master of Fine Arts students read from their work.

The student readers are:

Eric Shonkwiler (fiction)
Leonid Leonov (ficiton)
Kamala Puligandla (fiction)
Samantha Lamph (fiction)
Rachelle Cruz (poetry)
Angel Garcia (poetry)

A Reading for National Poetry Month

A poem can show you the world in a way you've never seen it before.  Poets At Work members Kim Dower, Yvonne M. Estrada, Steven Fleet, Dylan C. Gailey, Brett Guitar Hofer, Eric Howard, Sharon Venezio and Terry Wolverton will read poems that make you laugh, ache, swoon and think.