The Red Eye Cafe will open its doors at 6pm for coffee, food and mingling. The reading will start at 7pm. Readers for the inaugural event will be series co-founder Nicole Haroutunian, and acclaimed area writers Matthew Thomas and Abby Sher. 

Nicole Haroutunian, named a "New Author You Need to Know" by Refinery29, is a New Jersey native currently living in Woodside, Queens. Her first short story collection, Speed Dreaming, was published earlier this year. Matthew Caprioli wrote in The Paris Review, "Haroutunian is smart about contemporary relationships, and her collection will certainly resonant with the Modern Love crowd. Her protagonists, all women, admit to melodrama, but they go one step further than the characters in Girls in that they question what’s behind their woe-is-me antics. Through their honesty, we get characters we actually like, who illuminate what it means to be a woman outside of Lena Dunham’s 'Brooklyn.'"

Abby Sher is a writer, performer, and mother of three cool beans. She wrote and performed for The Second City, ImprovOlympic, HBO and NPR. Her memoir, Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl who Couldn’t Stop Praying got lots of awards and a nod from Oprah. Abby writes regularly for The New York Times and has an advice column called Dear Gefilte. She means well, but is usually five minutes late.

Matthew Thomas was born and raised in New York City; he lives in Montclair, NJ. He has a BA from the University of Chicago, an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His New York Times-bestselling novel We Are Not Ourselves was shortlisted for both the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, nominated for the Folio Prize, and named a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. It was named a Notable Book of the year by the New York Times, one of the fifty best fiction books of the year by the Washington Post, one of the ten best fiction books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, one of the five most important books of the year by Esquire, one of the best fiction books of the year by Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Apple, and one of Janet Maslin’s ten favorite books of the year in the New York Times.