The Red Eye Cafe will open its doors at 6pm for coffee, snacks, book-buying and mingling. The reading, followed by a Q&A, will be from 7-8:30pm. Readers are Tobias Carroll, Claudia Cortese, Hillary Frank, and Naomi J. Williams--all either New Jersey natives or current New Jersey residents.

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. His collection Transitory will be released in 2016 on Civil Coping Mechanisms. He grew up in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. 

Claudia Cortese is the author of two chapbooks—Blood Medals (Thrush Poetry Press, 2015), a collection of prose poems, and The Red Essay and Other Histories (Horse Less Press, 2015), a book of lyric essays. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, and Sixth Finch, and her essays and reviews have found homes at Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, and Iowa Review, among others. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in suburban Ohio and now lives in New Jersey, where she teaches at Montclair State University. Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), which explores a girl named Lucy, is her first full-length collection.

Hillary Frank is host and creator of the award-winning podcast The Longest Shortest Time. She has also been a frequent contributor to This American Life, Studio 360, and Weekend America. Hillary is the author and illustrator of three YA novels. Her first book and first radio story were both unsolicited submissions, which she hopes is proof to aspiring writers that getting published really is possible.

Naomi J. Williams was born in Japan and spoke no English until she was nearly six years old. Her debut novel, Landfalls, a fictionalized account of the 18th-century Lapérouse expedition (FSG 2015), was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and one-time winner, Naomi has published her short fiction in numerous literary journals, including A Public Space, One Story,  and The Gettysburg Review. A proud graduate of Verona High School, Naomi now makes her home in northern California, where she’s hard at work on her second book, a novel about the early 20th-century Japanese poet Yosano Akiko.