Join us for a special evening of refreshments, conversations, readings, video, and more in our annual evening showcasing great literary magazines.

Digging Through The Fat | ripping out the heart began as a call for literary action. We showcase prose, poetry, and visual arts from emerging and established creative folks throughout the year. We hold two reading periods: poetry in the Spring/Summer and fiction in the Fall/Winter. We also periodically publish personal essays, interviews, reviews, and links to published works. Our mission is to nurture a diverse community of artists, writers, poets, photographers, and publishers.

Literature that enlivens our eclectic artistic community: An introduction to Digging Through The Fat by founder and editor Gessy Alvarez and creative director Cynthia Alvarez, with special guest readers Tobias Carroll, Lauren Hilger, and Bud Smith.

Tobias Carroll (top left) is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books) and the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms), and his writing has been published by Tin House, Rolling Stone, Hazlitt, Men's Journal, and elsewhere.

Lauren Hilger (middle left) received a BA from New York University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Lady Be Good (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016.) Named the 2012 Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in Poetry from the MacDowell Colony, where she was a fellow in 2012 and 2014, she is also the recipient of the Agha Shahid Ali Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, and the Massachusetts Review, among other journals. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

Bud Smith (lower left) is the author of F250, Calm Face, and Dustbunny City, among others. He works heavy construction in NJ.

Gessy Alvarez is founder and editor of the literary and arts web journal Digging Through The Fat. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and is the recipient of scholarships from Columbia University, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Aspen Writers’ Foundation, as well as artist residencies at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Millay Colony for the Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow. Her prose has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Connotation Press, Volume One Brooklyn, Pank, and other publications.

Cynthia Alvarez holds a BFA from Pratt Institute. She is visual artist, designer, and creative director at Digging Through The Fat. You can view her artworks at www.calvarezart.com.

Founded online in 2004, Guernica is an award-winning magazine focused on the intersection of arts and politics. We publish memoir, reporting, interviews, commentary, poetry, fiction, and multimedia journalism exploring identity, conflict, culture, justice, science, and beyond. With contributors from every continent and at every stage of their careers, we are a home for singular voices, incisive ideas, and critical questions.

Working with the theme The Body Politic, two of our writers engaged with the subject of the body and how it's treated politically and culturally, Carmen Machado and Ann Neumann, will offer short readings, then engage in a discussion with Guernica editors Meara Sharma and Raluca Albu.

Raluca Albu (top right) is a Romanian American writer and translator. She's a senior nonfiction editor for Guernica and the online literature editor for BOMB.
 
Meara Sharma (right, second from top) is a producer for the public radio show On the Media and a senior nonfiction editor at Guernica.
 
Carmen Maria Machado’s (right, third from top) debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best Horror of the Year. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
 
Ann Neumann (lower right) is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon, 2016) and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media at New York University. She writes the monthly column "The Patient Body" about the intersection of religion and medicine for the Center's publication, The Revealer. Neumann has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baffler, the Guardian and, among other publications, Guernica magazine, where she is a contributing nonfiction editor.

Space is limited. To register, click below and log in or contact the Events Office at events@nysoclib.org or 212.288.6900 x230.

The Writing Life events in 2017 are generously underwritten by Jenny Lawrence.