First Sunday Prose Reading & Open Mic

First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic

Presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington

The featured readers are: Abegunde,  Amy Cornell, Khashayar Tonekaboni

Come early to sign up for Open Mic!

Abegunde is an ancestral priestess, healer, and poet. Her fellowships include Sacatar (Brasil), Ragdale, and Norcroft. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in Nocturnes, Wicked Alice, Warpland, Beyond the Frontier, The Kenyon Review, and Best African American Fiction. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Wishful Thinking and Contemporary Urban Prayer. ​An excerpt of her new poetry manuscript about visiting Juba, South Sudan was named a finalist for the 2017 COG Poetry Award, judged by US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.  ​She is a Memory Keeper who chooses to forget that words have limits. As a result, she spends her days and dreamtime chanting silenced memories into spoken histories. On the weekdays, when she isn’t birthing new words out of sound and images, she shapeshifts into an Indiana University professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the director of The Graduate Mentoring Center.

Amy L. Cornell is a local freelance writer and leads writing circles for women through Women Writing for a Change-Bloomington. (womenwritingbloomington.org)  She loves poetry, memoir, podcasts and world war II historical fiction.

Khash Tonekaboni is a transplanted Iranian, who writes under the pen name of Terry Pinaud.  He has always been fascinated by fiction — fiction that rubs elbows with the truth; fiction that encapsulates the strangeness of the real.  He tries to delve into the psyche of the characters in order to portray the elegance and horrors of humanity we see all around us.  Inspired by his love for storytelling, Terry Pinaud wrote his first short story at the age of eleven, and his first novel before he was eighteen. The love for writing and story-telling, combined with his belief in promoting a deeper understanding of human nature, has been the fodder for many of his current novels and many more to come.  In his stories he tries to pit the narrow-minded against the compassionately pragmatic, the blindly fervent against the proponents of diversity. His stories range from the mysterious and mystical to the historical through which, he hopes to add a voice to equality and tolerance while entertaining his readers. Khashayar Tonekaboni is a clinical professor at the Indiana University School of Optometry.