First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic

First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic

Presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington

With featured readers: Tom Bitters, Gabriel Peoples, Joan Hawkns

Come early to sign up for Open Mic!

Tom Bitters began writing fiction as a fifth grader when he produced a two-page note in pencil to his teacher attempting to explain a school absence that was unbeknownst to his parents.  He is a former newspaper columnist, human resource manager and more recently an ESL teacher in South Korea and Russia.  His last day in Moscow was the day Edward Snowden arrived to begin his exile in that country, and the two men were briefly in the same detaining room, Snowden for debriefing and Bitters for attempting to leave the country with large amounts of cash and vodka.  He writes short fiction, and his ratio of rejections to publications is worthy of mention in Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not!  He is currently an ESL tutor in the VITAL program at the Monroe County Public Library and serves on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Library there as well.

Gabriel Peoples hails from Detroit, MI and has performed at universities, high schools, radio stations, community centers, and theaters spanning two countries including: YFM in Johannesburg, ZA and The University of Zululand in KwaZulu-Natal, ZA, the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater in Ann Arbor, MI, Cornell University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also performed as a finalist of BNV Youth International Poetry Slam and as a finalist of the CUPSI (College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational). Peoples has opened for world-renowned poets such as, Amir Sulaiman, Saul Williams, and Marc Bamuthi Joseph. He desires to inspire people to use their imaginations creatively and with purpose and to think seriously about how their words, ideas, and bodies wield the power to change minds and create worlds. He studies Black performance and holds a Ph.D. in American Studies. A teacher by day, you will often find him DJing a party or writing by night. Ultimately, with one passion rubbing off or influencing another he ends up with a unique collection of music, scholarship, and techniques to perform prose and material with which to compose it.

Joan Hawkins is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at IU, who has written extensively on horror film and Avant-garde cinema.  She is the author of two books, is currently editing an anthology on the writer William S. Burroughs, and is committed to Spoken Word.