We can’t wait to welcome you to the first reading of our FIFTH season! And what a reading it will be, featuring Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Marcy Dermansky, Shelly Oria, and Tamara Zbrizher. Doors to the Red Eye Cafe will open at 6:30pm, with readings at 7pm, followed by a Q&A. Baked goods and coffee will be available from the Red Eye Cafe and books will be for sale from Watchung Booksellers.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Awl, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, story South, aaduna, r.k.v.r.y. and elsewhere. She has received a Henfield writing award, a Rhodes scholarship, and is a frequent public speaker on social justice as well as trauma and recovery. Her debut short story collection, White Dancing Elephants, was selected as the winner of Dzanc Books' 2017 Short Story Collection Prize, a finalist for the PEN American Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Story Collection and has received rave reviews in the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue India and elsewhere.

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Very Nice, The Red Car, Bad Marie and Twins. Very Nice, released on July 2, 2019 received rave reviews in The Washington Post, NY Newsday, NPR, People Magazine and elsewhere. Roxane Gay gave Very Nice 5 stars on Instagram and Sarah Jessica Parker just picked the novel as one of her favorite summer books. The Red Car was named a Best Book of the Year by Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, Flavorwire, and Huffington Post. Bad Marie was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer's Pick, a finalist in the Morning News Tournament of Books, and named one of the best novels of the year in Esquire. Her first novel Twins was a New York Times Editor's Choice Pick. Marcy's short fiction has been widely published and anthologized, appearing in McSweeney's, Guernica, The Indiana Review, Lenny Letter and elsewhere. Her essay "Maybe I Loved You" appeared in the best-selling anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. Marcy has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Edward Albee Foundation.  She is the winner of the Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award and Story Magazine Carson McCullers short story prize.  Powell's Bookstore named Marcy a Writer to Watch Out For. Marcy received her Bachelor of Arts at Haverford College and her Master of Arts at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern, Mississippi. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey with her daughter Nina.

Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), which earned nominations for a Lambda Literary Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, among other honors. Recently she coauthored a digital novella, CLEAN, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. In September of 2019, Indelible in the Hippocampus, an anthology of writings from the #metoo movement, compiled and edited by Oria, was published by McSweeney’s. Oria's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and elsewhere; has been translated to other languages; and has won a number of awards, including the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, a Sozopol Fiction Seminars Fellowship in Bulgaria, and the LMCC Workspace Grant. For several years, Oria curated and hosted the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village, along with theatre director Annie Levy. Oria lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she codirected the Writer’s Forum at the Pratt Institute for seven years, and where she has a private practice as a creativity coach.

Tamara Zbrizher is a Ukrainian American poet. She received her MFA at Drew University. Her work has been published in Event, Grist, Tinderbox Journal, Lunch Ticket, Naugatuck River Review, Mom Egg Review and others. Tamara’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net. Her first full-length collection Tell Me Something Good was released from Get Fresh Books in April 2019. She lives in New Jersey with her son and two overfed cats.

photo credits: Marcy Dermansky by Michael Lionstar, Shelly Oria by T Kira Madden