Tuesday, January 6, 2009

InterAct's Writing Aloud Featured on WXPN

Please tune in to WXPN (88.5 FM) on Monday, February 2, at 7:00 p.m., when InterAct Theatre Company's award-winning short fiction series, Writing Aloud, will be featured on "LIVE at the Writers House". As a long-standing collaboration between Kelly Writers House and WXPN, "LIVE at the Writers House" is a one-hour broadcast featuring poetry, music and other spoken-word art hosted by WXPN's own Michaela Majoun.



Celebrating its 10th Anniversary Season this year, InterAct's Writing Aloud program is an award-winning series featuring comtemporary short fiction read aloud on stage by professional actors. The January 26th edition of "LIVE at the Writers House" will feature the three short fictional stories that will be presented in upcoming editions of Writing Aloud. The stories included will be:

“A Courtship," written by Jonathan Liebson, will be presented during the Writing Aloud event on Monday, February 9. "A Courtship" tells the story of a southern widow who fantasizes about a local preacher as she struggles to take care of her unruly adolescent son. Jonathan Liebson's work has appeared in Chelsea, South Dakota Review, Harvard Review, Meridian and The Georgia Review, among other places, and has also won awards or been honored by The Atlantic Monthly and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom's annual fiction competition. A graduate of Wesleyan University, he holds an M.A. in literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, and an MFA in fiction from NYU. He currently teaches writing and literature at Eugene Lang College of The New School, in New York.

"Mitzraim (Means Tight Spaces, the Rabbi Said),” written by Liz Abrams-Morley, will be presented during the Monday, April 27 Writing Aloud event. “Mitzraim (Means Tight Spaces, the Rabbi Said)” tells the story of a grown daughter who struggle to deal with her aging father as he succumbs to Alzheimers. Liz Abrams-Morley is the author of the full-length poetry collection Learning to Calculate the Half Life, (Zinka Press, 2001) and two chapbooks including What Winter Reveals, (Plan B Press, 2005.) Her second full-length collection, Necessary Turns, is due out from Word Press in 2010. Liz's poems and short stories have appeared in a variety of nationally distributed journals and anthologies and both have been read on National Public Radio. She is on the MFA in Creative Writing faculty at Rosemont College, has worked as a poet-in-residence in grades K-12 in public and private schools throughout Pennsylvania, and is one of three director/editors at and a co-founder of an online writing consultation business, http://www.writearoundtheblock.org/. In the rest of her life she lives with her husband and two dog-like cats in Philadelphia, is a mother, a mother-in-law, wife, sister, family caretaker, friend and lapsed family therapist. She wades knee-deep in the flow of everyday life from which she draws constant inspiration and occasional exasperation.

“Your Story,” written by Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha, will also be included in Writing Aloud's Monday, April 27, event. "Your Story" tells how during the midst of an ice storm that closes down the state, a man is forced to reckon with himself and his relationship with his wife. Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha's work has appeared in Carve, Fiction Attic, Literary Mama, and Pindeldyboz. She earned a Masters in Fiction from Temple University, where she currently teaches creative writing. She also teaches reading and writing at Camden County College in New Jersey. She lives in New Jersey with her family, and is currently working on her first novel.

"LIVE at the Writers House" will be broadcast live from Kelly Writers House's Arts Cafe, located at 3805 Locust Walk on campus of Univeristy of Pennsylvania.

For more information about Kelly Writers House or WXPN's "LIVE at the Writers House" broadcast, visit http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/series/live/

To subscribe to Writing Aloud's remaining 2008/2009 Season (only $10 per event!), purchase tickets to an upcoming performance, or for more information about the program, visit http://www.interacttheatre.org/writing-aloud-2008-2009.html.