FIZZ

Chris Belden's novel "Carry-on" was published in January by Rain Mountain Press. A recent graduate of the Fairfield University MFA Program, CB has published stories in numerous small magazines; co-wrote the 1997 feature film Amnesia (starring Ally Sheedy); co-wrote the play The Ballad of Larry the Flyer (NY Fringe Fest, 2001); and has released two albums of original tunes, Songs About Anything and Camouflage. He currently teaches writing at Fairfield U., as well as at a high-security men's prison in CT.
Fran Metzman has published twenty-four short stories in various literary journals, as well as a novel. She was nominated for Dzanc Books "Best of the Web" 2009. Her story collection "The Hungry Heart" is forthcoming in January 2012 from Wilderness House Press. Fran has served on panels at writing conferences such as Philadelphia Stories and Marymount Manhattan College, and has taught workshops at Temple University, Bryn Mawr College, Penn State and many others. She presently teaches creative writing/memoir workshops at Temple University's School of Continuing Ed. She is fiction editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal and The Wild River Review. In the area of creative non-fiction, she writes a column called "The Age of Reasonable Doubt." http://wildriverreview.com/metzman.
J.E. Reich hails originally from Pittsburgh, PA--a drinking town with a football problem--and received her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Her writing writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Armchair/Shotgun, Volume 1 Brooklyn, plain china: The Best of Undergraduate Writing 2010, KGB Bar & Lit Journal, Underground Voices, The Emerson Review, and others. Her writing was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010 and an EVVY Award in 2009, and she was the recipient of the Pitler Scholarship in 2011. Reich currently resides in Brooklyn, NY as a candidate for an MA in Literature at Brooklyn College, an intern for the Franklin Park Reading Series, and is currently working on her first novel.
Timothy Gager is the author of nine books of short fiction and poetry. His latest Treating a Sick Animal: Flash and Micro Fictions (Cervena Barva Press) features over forty stories, many previously published in various literary magazines. He has hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA every month for the past ten years. His work has appeared in Night Train, Smokelong Weekly, McSweeneys, Hobart, Twelve Stories, JMWW, The Smoking Poet, Word Riot, Skive, Dogzplot, Metazen and many other venues. He has had over 250 works of fiction and poetry published since 2007 and received nine Pushcart Prize nominations. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts and is employed as a social worker.
Series Host Susan Tepper