This Sunday: The Last Event of the Summer at The Writer's Center

This Sunday, July 12, from 2-4 p.m., The Writer's Center will host writers Austin Camacho, Frank S. Joseph, Angela Render, Laura Shovan, and Lynn Stearns.

Join these Maryland writers as they read from their work in the Maryland Writers’ Association’s debut anthology, New Lines from the Old Line State.

This event also marks our last event of the summer. Perhaps you’ve been meaning to attend one of our events this summer – or more events – but time has gotten away from you. Don’t let time get the best of you on Sunday! Take this opportunity to hear some great work from other writers in

our community.

Below is a short introduction to the writers you'll hear on Sunday:

Austin Camacho is the author of five detective novels in the Hannibal Jones series - The Troubleshooter, Blood and Bone, Collateral Damage, Damaged Goods and Russian Roulette, plus two action thrillers, The Payback Assignment and The Orion Assignment. He served as president of the Maryland Writers Association and currently serves as president of the Northern Virginia chapter of the Virginia Writers Club. He also teaches writing at Anne Arundel Community College and is a public affairs specialist for the Defense Department.

Frank S. Joseph got his start in journalism at the City News Bureau of Chicago and worked at The Associated Press, covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Detroit riot, Dr. Martin Luther King’s march into Cicero IL, along with many other uprisings and urban violence prevalent in the mid-‘60s in Chicago. Frank then became an editor with the Washington Post during the Watergate years and later turned to publishing. His first novel, To Love Mercy, published in 2006, has won six awards.

Angela Render has been designing and maintaining web sites for over a decade. She was the Web Editorial Assistant and then the Web Developer for Smithsonian Magazine for four years. Her first novel, Forged by Lightning: A Novel of Hannibal and Scipio, was published in 2006. She currently has a column called Computer Business in the Writers' Journal. She leads workshops about blogging and marketing at The Writer's Center, including some workshops this month.

Laura Shovan has published her poetry in Lips, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, the Paterson Literary Review, the Global City Review, The Little Patuxent Review, Poets Online, and an upcoming anthology – Words & Images of Belonging. Also a teacher, Laura has also combined her interest in poetry with her love of children. She has conducted poetry workshops for children in conjunction with the Maryland State Arts Council and has also taught journalism for children. She also freelances for local publications, such as the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Magazine and Baltimore’s Child.

Lynn Stearns currently serves as the associate fiction editor for the Potomac Review. Her work has appeared in the Bitter Oleander, descant, Haight-Ashbury Review, Troika, Wascana Review, and other publications. She has received awards for short stories, narratives, and poetry from Mentor, the National League of American Pen Women, Random House, among others. Lynn will lead a workshop on writing memoirs at The Writer's Center this fall.

For more information on the Maryland Writer's Association and New Lines from the Old Line State, click here.

Open Mic Night

Last Friday, I hosted our first open mic for the fall season. I'm still recovering from all of that heat, raw energy, and all of those stirring poems. Each of them moved me in different ways.

Truth be told, I haven’t had much time to attend any of the open mic venues in the District where I live and claim my literary allegiance. Hosting the open mic at the Writer’s Center, however, took me back to why writing matters so much.

Just sitting in the audience and occasionally introducing poets, I got entered a dozen people's lives. Suddenly, I cared about what pressed on their chests. I listened to pastoral poems. Poems about loss, war, heartbreak. There was a beautiful woman who performed a song “in the language of the deaf.” There were whimsical poems, sound poetry whose words would riff right off the page.

It was quite a spectacle, something that I look forward to doing again, and I hope to see you there next time.

Did any of you attend out open mic event? What did you think? Don't be shy.