Introducing Mike Young's Curator Series

We are excited to announce Mike Young's series of featured authors! Mike was an obvious choice for curator because he seems to have traveled to every corner of the contemporary literary world. As author, publisher, and performer, he sees firsthand the work from some of the best emerging writers.

While his participation in the literary community began online through venues like the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, he also has physical roots in some of the most vibrant swamps for good words: Western Massachusetts, Baltimore, and now Portland, Oregon.

In 2005, he co-founded the literary magazine NOÖ Journal, which has in its ten year run published 600+ authors and artists. It's distributed online and in print (for free!) all over the country. In 2007, he started Magic Helicopter Press, which puts out chapbooks and full length books of genre-scuttling poetry, prose, and interactive art. Work published by Magic Helicopter has received acclaim from Nylon, The Rumpus, American Book Review, The Poetry Foundation, Best American Poetry, VICE, BOMB, and more. 

Along with his editorial work, Mike is the author of three books: Sprezzatura (2014, poems), Look! Look! Feathers (2010, stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (2010, poems). As a performer, he's shared many a stage with other authors promoting their work, in spots like the Cantab Lounge, Brown University, the Center for Fiction in NYC, and elsewhere. He also contributes to the literary blog Real Pants, writing about both literary magazines and readings. Mike lives online at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com and offline in Portland, OR, unless he is out on the road reading his heart out.

See his thoughts on his author choices, the list of authors, and their schedules here.

Introducing Dan Bevacqua

We are featuring Dan Bevacqua starting today. In several ways, he is a different type of author than what we've had thus far. For one, his stories tend to be longer, so we'll post fewer of them. Also, Dan has had the luxury of eschewing social media, so it'll seem like a quieter Feature since we won't be directing you to the many ways to find his work or to follow him. Don't be mislead by this--he is highly regarded as an emerging writer. In fact, it was interest in his stories that fueled the start of Awst Press. 

In June, Adam Wilson suggested one of Dan's stories for Electric Literature's Recommended Reading. He wrote, "He’s also one of the best young writers in America, a true and singular talent, combining Carver-esque atmospherics with the black comic impulse of Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo’s ear for American absurdity, and characters that might have been written by Flannery O’Connor if she’d grown up in rural Vermont at the turn of the millennium." We couldn't say it any better!

Here's his BIO. Come back on Monday to read his first story.

Dan Bevacqua received his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His work has appeared in the New Orleans Review, Tweed's Magazine of Literature and Art, The New Inquiry, and Gigantic. He is the fiction editor at JERRY Magazine, and lives in Northampton, MA.