First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic

Presented by the Writers Guild

The featured readers are:

Molly Gleeson

and

Claire Arbogast

Sunday, Dec 3, 2023

3:00 to 5:00

Morgenstern’s

849 S Auto Mall Road

Come early to sign up for Open Mic!

Molly Gleeson was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her story, ‘Meishi, Furo, Neru’, which won first place in The Midnight Oil Magazine’s short story contest in 2020. She has also been published in The Apeiron Review, Crab Fat Literary Magazine, and Brush Talks, among others. Molly spent seven years teaching English in China, Saudi Arabia, and Japan and is now happy to be back in her hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. She is working on her second novel, which she hopes will not remain as unpublished as her first.

Claire Arbogast is the author of the novel If Not the Whole Truth [due to be published by the end of next year] and Leave the Dogs at Home: A Memoir published by Indiana University Press. Leave the Dogs at Home was winner of the 2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection and was called an “excellent choice” by the Library Journal—you can find it on the local author shelf here at Morganstern.

Researching and writing If Not the Whole Truth—a novel about a young woman who struggles to ferret out her place in the counterculture of the late 1960s era only to find in 2022 America that everything she holds dear, even her own life, is in jeopardy—re-activated Claire politically. She became a Planned Parenthood escort (short-lived as Indiana’s abortion ban was reinstated), joined the National Organization of Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and PEN America. She is a member of the Writers Guild at Bloomington, the Indiana Writers Center, the Chicago Writers Association, a grateful past participant of Women Writing for a Change, and a recurring donor to the Susan A. Moke Endowment Fund.

She has a B.A. in journalism from Indiana University and was awarded the 2009–2010 Greer Artist Fellowship Award and a scholarship to the 2009 The Ropewalk Writer’s Conference Master’s Class.

Claire’s books, essays, and short fiction, as well as blog posts found on www.clairearbogast.com/blog-inside-stories, challenge attitudes and start conversations.