Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 7
Grab a cocktail or mocktail, kick back, and hear seven dynamite queer writers, from Maine and beyond, read their work after hours at Cocktail Mary.
Featured writers include Johan Alexander, Chen Chen, Michael Colbert, Melissa Febos, Emily Lowe, Rebecca Turkewitz, and Arisa White.
Author books will be available for purchase by Print: A Bookstore.
Johan Alexander's work has received support from Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Periplus Collective, and Anaphora Arts Writing Residencies, and he was an inaugural Maine Lit Fest Fellow in 2022. His last three written pieces appear in LatineLit Winter ’24, Eunoia Review, and the Periplus Anthology. Born in Medellín, Colombia, he currently lives in Portland, Maine. Everything at http://johanalexander.com
Chen Chen 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 Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, NY and teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch.
Michael Colbert is a gay writer and editor based in Portland, where he’s at work on a novel. He holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington, where he taught creative writing and was a 2021 Brauer Fellow, and attended the Tin House Summer Workshop. He’s the founding editor of The Rejoinder and has served as a reader for Ecotone and Story, and as an editor and columnist for No Contact. His writing appears in One Story, Esquire, NYLON, Down East, Decor Maine, and the Cincinnati Review, among others.
Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the nationally bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which has been translated into seven languages and was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and named a notable book of 2021 by NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and others. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), was also a national bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, and an Indie Next Pick. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred. A. Knopf. The recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, Melissa's work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.
Emily Lowe is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and educator. She holds an MFA from UNCW where she was the 2019-2020 Philip Gerard writing fellow. She is an editor for The Rejoinder, a magazine of serialized fiction, and her writing can be found in The Chicago Review, The Normal School, No Contact Magazine and River Teeth Journal among others. She is currently at work on a collection of stories centered around queer fairy tales and a novel that circles sapphic obsession. More on Emily at emilylowewriter.com.
Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the story collection Here in the Night, which was a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards and named one of Debutiful’s Best Debuts of 2023. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, Best Microfiction 2023and 2024, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University.
Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, Sarah Lawrence College alumna, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess, Post Pardon, Black Pearl, Perfect on Accident, and “Fish Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. Her current publications are the poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy and the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, co-edited with Miah Jeffra and Monique Mero and published by Foglifter Press. In collaboration with composer Jessica Jones, Arisa is working on Post Pardon: The Opera, which will premiere in 2025. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2005, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2019, her poetry has been published widely and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet.
