As part of A SmokeLong Summer 2023, we are thrilled to host several authors whose celebrated work has exemplified the form in so many ways. If you are participating in A SmokeLong Summer 2023, these events are included and will be recorded for participants unable to attend the 90-minute live event. We are still updating these events. Stay tuned!
June 4. 2pm EST. Denne Michele Norris
Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, where she is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, the Tin House Summer Workshop, The Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and VCCA, and her short stories appear in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for the 2018 Best Small Fictions Prize, and co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
June 9. 1pm EST. Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.
July 1. 11am PST. K-Ming Chang
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook BONE HOUSE was published by Bull City Press. Her most recent book is GODS OF WANT (One World/Random House, 2022). Her next books are a novel titled ORGAN MEATS (One World, 2023) and a novella titled CECILIA (Coffee House Press). She loves folklore, vampire literature, and birdwatching in her home state of California.
August 5. Noon EST. Michelle Ross
Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award; Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (2022). Her work is anthologized in Best Microfiction 2020, 2021, and 2023; Best Small Fictions 2021; the Wigleaf Top 50 2019 and 2022; the 2023 Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America, and other anthologies. It’s received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology.
A SmokeLong Summer 24!