I first met Kate in a bookstore. She had already launched the website Last Night’s Reading a month or two before. I recognized her from other readings and saw that she was recording the event and drawing notes. A few weeks earlier, Bookstalker Julia Bartz had caught me in the act of notetaking and introduced herself to me so I followed her lead, introducing myself to Kate. I’m sure I frightened her with my enthusiasm. Over the following years, I’ve run into Kate at various events. She has a keen sense about choosing which events to attend, and whenever I see her in the audience, I feel reassured about my choice for the evening. Sometimes Kate, Julia, and I end up attending and then writing about / drawing the same event: when the trifecta is in the house, you know its going to be the very best type of event.

Kate Gavino launched her book Last Night’s Reading at Housing Works, but the event was as much a celebration of literary readings as it was the book. She assembled an A-List cast of authors to read embarrassing stories, and she presented slideshow survival guide to literary events.

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Sigal Samuel, a playwright and journalist, released her debut novel, The Mystics of Mile End earlier this month. She spoke with Buzzfeed’s Isaac Fitzgerald at Community Bookstore.

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The New York City Reading Series Census is an ongoing project to catalogue the contemporary literary scene. Any reading series curator in the New York area can take the survey here.

What is the name of the series, and what is the significance or meaning of the series name?
The series is Mental Marginalia and there’s no real significance to the name other than giving something a good name is really difficult and this was the first thing that we (Mark Gurarie and Alex Crowley) both said “yeah!” to. there’s a notebook somewhere with like 30+ awful names in it.

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There’s been some good buzz around the reading series Soul Sister Revue, curated by the poet Cynthia Manick. I was eager to see how the series has taken shape since its early shows at Cornelia Street Café and the New York Poetry Festival.

I headed to Hi-Fi in the East Village on a recent Tuesday night. The back-room felt intimate in an old-school-Village kind of way, complete with red brick and a tiny stage.

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Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latin@ punk poet & prison abolitionist. Their first chapbook “Sad Girl Poems” is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press. They’ve interned at the Poetry Society of America & received an MFA in poetry from NYU. They cofounded The Undocupoets Campaign with Javier Zamora & Marcelo Hernandez Castillo in 2015. They edit Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation. Originally from the Los Angeles area; they now live in Brooklyn.

Roberto F. Santiago: First and foremost, I have to congratulate you on your wonderful chapbook SAD GIRL POEMS. It is heartbreakingly lovely, and I am sure Lana Del Rey is gonna love it! I took your collection with me on my lunch break with the intention of having a bite and a few poems for lunch. I wound up reading it cover to cover… and I am sure SAD GIRL POEMS had me for lunch, rather than the inverse!

Loma: Thanks!

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Sloane Crosley is one of the funniest women writing today. Her two previous essay collections, How Did You Get This Number and I Was Told There’d be Cake, are confessional, often self-deprecating, and always funny. Her debut novel, The Clasp, continues to explore similar themes. She launched the book–available in multiple colored covers–at BookCourt in Brooklyn last week.

The novel, she explains, is actually a tribute to the short story, a genre she adores. The narrative is told through three different characters while mixing in vignettes of other people the three main characters encounter.

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The New York City Reading Series Census is an ongoing project to catalogue the contemporary literary scene. Any reading series curator in the New York area can take the survey here.

What is the name of the series, and what is the significance or meaning of the series name?
The name of the series is “Sideshow Goshko Storytelling Series.” It’s a storytelling series where NY’s top comedians, writers, and performers share true, bizarre tales about their lives. We don’t do monthly story themes, just the overall “sideshow” theme of those weird tales we all have.

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A thunderstorm couldn’t have been more fitting weather for the launch of Upright Beasts, Lincoln Michel’s debut collection of short fiction out now from Coffee House Press.

Michel, who earned his MFA at Columbia University, is a model literary citizen. He is the co-founder of Gigantic, the online editor of Electric Literature and a drawer of “Monster Lit” trading cards. He also describes himself as a “fairly frequent tweeter.”

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