The Literary Saloon

Sunday, 5:00 pm EDT December 15, 2024

The Center for Fiction

RSVPs are optional and drink purchases from our Café & Bar are kindly requested.

The Literary Saloon is a monthly, mixed-genre reading series at The Center for Fiction. With an emphasis on local emerging talent and a dedication to diverse and underrepresented voices, these are unique, welcoming, and fun literary events with a Sunday-evening-at-the-bar-with-my-friends vibe.

Host and curator Wesley Straton (The Bartender’s Cure) started hosting readings in the spring of 2021 in the outdoor area of New York Distilling Company, as a way to reconnect readers and writers as we slowly came out of Covid lockdown. Since then she has hosted early-career playwrights alongside bestselling memoirists; debut novelists and award-winning poets; and the occasional comedian.

Featuring

Sarah Bridgins

Sarah Bridgins

Sarah Bridgins is the author of the Sexton Poetry Prize winning collection Death and Exes (Eyewear Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in Tin House, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and Joyland among other publications. She is the co-founder of the Ditmas Lit reading series in Brooklyn.

Photo Credit: Maeghan Donohue
Rachel Dodes & Lauren Mechling

Rachel Dodes & Lauren Mechling

Rachel Dodes is a freelance culture writer. She’s a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, and her work has also appeared in Town & Country, Elle, Esquire, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Buzzfeed, among other publications. She was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal where she covered fashion and film. She lives in New York with her husband, son, and dog.

Lauren Mechling is a senior editor at the Guardian U.S. and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the New Yorker online, and Vogue, where she authored a regular book column. She’s worked as a crime reporter and metro columnist for the New York Sun and as features editor at the Wall Street Journal. She is also a young adult novelist. She is the mastermind behind the popular Instagram profile @thecloglife. A graduate of Harvard College, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.

Photo Credit: Katja Hentschel
Jen Lue

Jen Lue

Jen Lue is an alumna of The Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA fiction finalist. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Tin House, Jerome Foundation, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, among others. Her work has been featured in the Margins, BOMB magazine, and Joyland.
Nina St. Pierre

Nina St. Pierre

Nina St. Pierre is the author of the memoir, Love is a Burning Thing, which was featured in People magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and named one of Esquire’s Best Memoirs of 2024. Her essays and features on spirituality, the body, queerness, and the American West, have been published in GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Gossamer, Outside, Bitch, the Cut, Elle, NYLON, and more. She was a 2023 NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature and holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden.

Photo Credit: LaQuann Dawson