Players Pub Spoken Word Series

Players Pub Spoken Word Series
Sponsored by Writers Guild at Bloomington

Featuring fiction by Laurie Stone, Joan Hawkins, and Bix Gabriel
with music by the O2R Blues Band

$5 cover (added to your tab)

There will also be an open mic.

Laurie Stone is author of My Life as an Animal, Stories (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press), the novel Starting with Serge (Doubleday), and the essay collection Laughing in the Dark (Ecco). She is editor of and contributor to the memoir anthology Close to the Bone (Grove). A longtime writer for the Village Voice (1974-1999), she has been theater critic for The Nation and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. In 1996 she won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews have been published in the L.A. Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. She is at work on the fiction collection The Love of Strangers. Her website is: lauriestonewriter.com.

Bix Gabriel is a writer, MFA candidate in fiction at Indiana University-Bloomington, a fiction editor at The Offing magazine, associate director of Indiana University Writers’ Conference, co-founder of TakeTwo Services, occasional Tweeter, seeker of the perfect jalebi, and a wishful gardener.

Joan Hawkins writes creative nonfiction and performs Spoken Word. She’s the coordinator of the Writer’s Guild First Sunday Prose Series (so if you’re a prose writer, you should talk to her) and she serves on the Board of The Burroughs Century. She is currently co-editing an anthology on the writer William S. Burroughs, and is a lifelong Leonard Cohen fan.

O2R is a band with a sense of humor and fun. Even their name, which has been “O2R” for so long I can’t remember what it stands for—Open to Regret, Ridicule, Righteousness, Riches?—whatever. I’m sure the part that counts is the “Open to. . . .” For the band—Zain Mackey-vocals, Lee Van Buskirk-lead guitar and vocals, Ken Grooms-bass guitar, Jim Sprague-rhythm guitar and vocals, and Michele Brentano—piano, along with a dazzling array of drummers—is all about having a wonderful time with music. Originally begun as a blues band, they’ve added soul, the Beatles, rock, and country tunes over time because they got adventuresome, more well-rounded, better at arrangement and instrumentation, and doggonit, just because they wanted to!

There will also be an open mic.$5 cover (can be added to your tab).