The Café & Bar Presents Exhibit B in NYC: A Reading

Featuring

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  John Manuel Arias

  John Manuel Arias

  John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican-American poet and writer. He is a Canto Mundo fellow & alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His prose and poetry have been published in PANK, the Rumpus, F(r)iction, Joyland magazine, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts. Where There Was Fire is his debut novel.

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  Monique Laban

  Monique Laban

  Monique Laban’s fiction and essays have appeared in the Offing, Catapult, the Florida Review, Clarkesworld, and elsewhere. She was a 2023 Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a 2022 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence, and an attendee of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Viable Paradise Workshop, and VONA. She lives in the Upper East Side and is currently at work on a novel.

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  Soraya Palmer

  Soraya Palmer

  Soraya Palmer is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts. She is a Flatbush-born-and-raised writer and licensed social worker. Her novel was named one of Today’s “38 Best New Books to Read in 2023,” one of the “Buzziest Debut Novels of the New Year” by Goodreads, one of the “Best and Most Anticipated Books of 2023” by Elle magazine, and one of “The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2023” by Ms. magazine. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Hazlitt, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center and graduated from the Virginia Tech MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.

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  Asha Thanki

  Asha Thanki

  Asha Thanki is the author of the novel A Thousand Times Before, forthcoming summer 2024 from Viking Books. An essayist and fiction writer raised in St. Louis, her work has appeared in Catapult, the Gettysburg Review, the Southern Review, and more. She is a Kundiman fellow and received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.