Four of your favorite creative nonfiction literary magazines are teaming up once again for an offsite reading at AWP – The Association of Writer’s and Writers Program’s annual conference.
This year, the massive event brings us back to the City of Angels; the conference itself runs from March 23-26, 2025, and our off-site reading is slated for Friday evening. We hope you’ll join us.
The Nitty Gritty Details
Here’s when and where to find us:
Date: Friday, March 28
Time: 6 to 8 p.m.
Location: Bonaventure Brewing Co. (4th floor of Westin Hotel)
Address: 404 S Figueroa St.
Note from a local about parking: The Bonaventure is surrounded by parking garages, but these fill up fast. ParkWhiz or bestparking.com are options to book parking in advance. It’s usually $20-30. Bonaventure also has valet parking for $50 or so.
Bonaventure is located on the 4th floor of the hotel.
Quick Look at the Line-Up
As is tradition, each magazine invited two previous contributors to represent them during the reading. Editors and other staff members from each magazine will also be on hand to introduce our readers! We look forward to meeting you! Here’s the line-up:
Fourth Genre
- Mara Hoffman
- Julie Marie Wade
Hippocampus Magazine
- Amy Fish
- Ona Gritz
River Teeth
- Melody Glenn
- Heather Lanier
Under the Gum Tree
- Laura Julier
- Brad Snyder
Meet Our Readers
(additional bios forthcoming)
Amy Fish is a born storyteller with a tendency to over-research. Her fourth book, One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity comes out in April 2025 with Goose Lane Editions. Amy is also a frequent contributor to Hippocampus Magazine’s reviews and interviews section.
Melody Glenn is an assistant professor of addiction and emergency medicine at The University of Arizona and serves on the board of Cochise Harm Reduction. Beyond her work in the medical field, she is a Tin House Workshop alum with an MFA from Mills College whose writing has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her first book, Mother of Methadone, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in July of 2025. She is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.
Ona Gritz’s 2024 memoir, Everywhere I Look, received the Pencraft Best Book Award in Memoir, the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, and was named the StoryTrade Nonfiction Book of the Year. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Brevity, River Teeth, Salon, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
Laura Julier is former editor of Fourth Genre. Her lyric memoir, Off Izaak Walton Road: The Grace that Comes through Loss, won the 2023 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Award and is available at AWP from University of New Mexico Press. Her essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Under the Gum Tree, Assay, Gulf Stream Magazine, and The MacGuffin. For many years, she was a professor of writing at Michigan State University. She currently works as a hospital chaplain and lives in Iowa City in a house built in 1893, off a dirt alley, where once a barred owl lived in an old swamp maple.
Heather Lanier is the author of the poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, and the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She often writes at the intersections of feminism and spirituality. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, The Sun, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She is not from New Jersey, the Garden State, but she somehow manages to live there, and while she does not garden, she will gladly read your memoir about it. She teaches at Rowan University, where she just got tenure!
Brad Snyder is a writer whose work has appeared in HuffPost Personal, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Hippocampus Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Bay Path University and is currently working on a memoir. Brad lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his husband, daughter, son, and sometimes-warring cat and dogs. You can find more of his work at bradmsnyder.com.
