Since 1994, Red Hen Press has worked to publish over 250 works of literary excellence, to foster diversity, and to promote literacy in our local schools, seeking a community of readers and writers who are actively engaged in the essential human practice known as literature. After seventeen years of being Southern California’s premier independent publisher of poetry and literary fiction, Red Hen Press will celebrate with a spectacular event featuring conversations with local literary celebrities, a deluxe luncheon, the conferring of three awards, a raffle, a silent auction, and readings by three highly esteemed authors:

Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently The Signal: A Novel (2009).  His short stories have appeared in Esquire,Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and dozens of other journals and anthologies. He is the co-director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Among his awards are the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, Ploughshares’ Cohen Prize, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), and Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.  Her first poetry collection won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

T.C. Boyle is the author of twenty-two books of fiction, including, most recently, Wild Child (2010) and When the Killing’s Done (2011). He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, where he is Distinguished Professor of English. His stories have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review,and McSweeney’s, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Prize for best novel of the year (World’s End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T.C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997).

Other guests include Alice Quinn, Danzy Senna, Percival Everett, Helena Maria Viramontes, Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Harper Webb, Aimee Liu, Judith Freeman,and Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard.

Proceeds from this event will not only help Red Hen continue its tradition of literary achievement, it will also benefit Red Hen’s Writing in the Schools program, a literacy initiative for underprivileged K-12 students that has provided writing workshops throughout Los Angeles County since 2003.  The event will feature poetry readings from participating WIS students at Cleveland Elementary School in Pasadena.

Tables are available for $1,000 and up; individual tickets are $110. For more information, please contact the press at anniversary@redhen.org.

Suck on the Marrow is ambitious, complex, unflinching, and ultimately welcoming, so that the ugliness, the pain and suffering that can’t be avoided in this history can actually be experienced fully by a reader who is not being called to war, but as witness to human experience.

Read the full review here.

The Spirit of femininity is as old as women are. “Among the Goddesses” is a blend of epic poem and Libretto, as Annie Finch tells the story of Marie and Lily as they experience all the tragedy and triumph that comes with womanhood, looking to the mother goddesses that predate Christianity for guidance in the most trying of times. Driven and powerful writing in play format, “Among the Goddesses” is an excellent read and a first pick for literary fiction and poetry collections.

That’s the whole thing, but you can see it in the original here.

In ConnotationPress.com’s book review column, playwright Traci Parks gives Janice Eidus’ haunting coming of age tale a rave rewiew, praising how the “…Conflict between Lilith’s ambition/virginity and the temptations that come her way fires the book forward with page-turning suspense.”

Read the rest of the review online here.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the sixth significant honor this book has received: it won the Northern California Book Award, received a silver medal in the California Book Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards.

It’s a very good book. Read more about it here.

In the latest issue of Pif Magazine, William Trowbridge talks to Derek Alger about the thematic context of Ship of Fool, and his lifelong fascination with the fool archetype, which started with a childhood fondness for pratfalling comedians like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel & Hardy.

“I suppose we can consider our Edenic parents the first fools, and we’ve carried on the tradition without interruption ever since. It’s in our blood. The fool represents human fallibility, and mine also represents the human capacity for hope in hopeless situations and a basic will towards goodness, however unreachable that may be in a world that is most often veering towards its opposite.”

The rest of their conversation can be found online here.

Larry Wilson discusses the serendipitous titling of Bin Laden’s Bald Spot in the Pasadena Star-News, jokingly noting that, “It isn’t often that the assassination by Navy SEALs of a heinous terrorist plays right into the marketing plans of a small, local, highly literary book publishing company.”

Wilson writes about how Brian Doyle’s latest became unexpectedly topical with the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. He gives high praise to the book itself as well, writing that Doyle’s work is “Good as well as nicely timed,” and calling his stories “Fantastically funny and well-written, right from the get-go.”

You can find the rest of Wilson’s article online here.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the sixth significant honor this book has received: it won the Northern California Book Award, received a silver medal in the California Book Award, and was a finalist fre the NAACP Image Awards, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards.

It’s a very good book. Read more about it here.

The rest of the article can be accessed online here.