The PEN Center USA Emerging Voices 2017 Final Reading at the Skirball Cultural Center

Featuring Soleil David, Peter H.Z. Hsu, Kirin Khan, Chinyere Nwodim, and Jessica Shoemaker

Enjoy poetry and fiction read by this year’s PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellows, with personal introductions by their mentors Jade Chang, Amelia Gray, Ashaki M. Jackson, Dana Johnson, and J. Ryan Stradal.

Presented cabaret-style with cocktails and light fare available for purchase. A reception with refreshments follows the program.

“Because of PEN, I am now connected. I now know how to get myself published. I have the resources to master my craft.
Now I call myself a writer.”
-Jian Huang, 2016 EV

This event is FREE; Reserve seats HERE

The Skirball Cultural Center: 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049

I’ll be reading my short story “Asleep For Days” as part of Lily Anne Harrison’s The Blue Hour reading series. I’ll be joined on stage with several talented young writers, including my friends Barton Aikman and Matt Buga. Come see us!

If you missed Pete’s panel/talk at Skylight last week, his essay is up at the PEN Center USA website.

And then a writer goes to a special event like, for example, the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship Meet and Greet at Skylight Books. You go and stand outside, looking in through the front doors. You stand outside for a very long time and then go home without having gone in. Another time, you walk past those front doors, walking at a brisk pace, craning your neck to get a peek inside, but not stopping. And another time, you stop at the front doors and pretend to be looking at your cellphone, checking messages, and not going in. You get a call while standing there, and then you take the call and go back to your car and drive away. You feel relieved, having missed out on something that you really wanted but it was scary and anyway who did you think you were fooling?

The Emerging Voices Fellowship is a literary mentorship that aims to provide new writers who are isolated from the literary establishment with the tools, skills, and knowledge they need to launch a professional writing career.

Pete’s newest short story, “Mission Concept,” will be published June 21 in the Summer 2017 issue of Flapperhouse! Flapperhouse is a literary journal with a particular & peculiar focus on the surreal, shadowy, sensual, and satirical. It’s the brainchild of Joseph P. O’Brien and has featured the work of Carroll Sun Yang, Kristine Ong Muslim, Leland Cheuk, Maria Pinto, and many, many flappy others.

Subscribe to Flapperhouse HERE!

Pete’s short story “There Are No More Secrets On Planet Earth” was published today in Your Impossible Voice.

“There Are No More Secrets On Planet Earth” is a speculative fiction short story set a future where technology has allowed mankind to view the entire history of the Planet Earth on their television sets.

Here’s an excerpt:

Every secret ever lied about, covered up, buried, or repressed is now available for all to see, or is in the process of becoming available for all to see. The entire history of Earth, viewable by anyone with a $10,000/week subscription to Ectoscope™ or even a pocket full of credits to pump into a pay-by-the-minute Ectoscope™ Arcade machine.

Who would’ve thought time travel would turn out like this. No complicated machines, no wormholes, no lightning orbs, no silver DeLoreans, no spaceships slingshotting around the sun, no ancient magic awoken from the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.

None of that.

Just a really powerful telescope. A telescope with unlimited resolution and computers to track the trajectory of Earth’s reflection through space from today all the way back to the Big Bang.

Your Impossible Voice is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary journal dedicated to advancing literary arts by supporting writers and poets, encouraging readership, and promoting academic literary scholarship. We publish brash and velvety new work from around the globe, as well as literary reviews, essays, and interviews. For a better idea of what our editors are looking for at the moment, please consult our call for submissions. Issues of the journal are available on our website and in print.

The PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellows took the stage on Saturday, April 29th to read from the works in progress. Tongue & Groove is a Los Angeles based literary reading series hosted by Conrad Romo.

Photos by Wes Kriesel

Kirin Khan reads a scene from her novel-in-progress Bludgeon.

Soleil David reads from her forthcoming poetry collection Guerilla.

Peter H.Z. Hsu reads an excerpt from his short story “Astronauts.”

Jessica Shoemaker reads a short story from her upcoming collection Like Stonewall Jackson’s Arm.

Chinyere Nwodim reads her short story “Naked Lady Table.”

The 2017 Emerging Voices
at Tongue and Groove

Saturday, April 29 at 6 PM – 7 PM

The Hotel Cafe
1623 1/2 N Cahuenga Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028

5:30 PM Doors | 6 PM Reading
$6 cover (21+)P

PEN Center USA and Tongue and Groove present a reading by the 2017 Emerging Voices Fellows at Hotel Café. Join us for a night of readings, music, and drinks.

Featuring: Soleil David, Peter H.Z. Hsu, Kirin Khan, Chinyere Nwodim, and Jessica Shoemaker. And Musical Guest: Mister Paradise.

— R.S.V.P. on Facebook —

Pete’s short story “Asleep For Days” was published today in F(r)online, the online imprint of F(r)iction Magazine.

“Asleep For Days” is a pseudo-utopic 2nd-amendment after-life love story. In other words, it’s weird.

Here’s an excerpt:

Day 7

I’m at home, cleaning my gun. I unintentionally fire a bullet. The bullet goes through my hand, through my dad’s television set, through the wall, through my neighbor’s wall and into my neighbor’s house. In that house a baby is nursing in her mother’s arms. As the bullet makes its way to the baby, the baby draws her gun and fires twice at my bullet.

One of the baby’s bullets hits my bullet and knocks it off its path.

Her other bullet travels through the wall and back into my house, striking my other hand. I look at my hands, which now have matching bullet holes in them.

I think that this must have religious significance.

I tell my dad to call the Vatican.

He calls an ambulance instead.

F(r)iction Magazine is the brainchild of a ragtag team of editors, artists, and writers, F(r)iction is experimental. F(r)iction is strange. F(r)iction pokes the soft spots, touches nerves most would rather remain protected. F(r)iction is secrets and truths and most importantly—stories. F(r)iction is weird, in every respect. Support F(r)iction HERE

PEN Center USA asked their 2017 Emerging Voices Fellows to answer the question: “What does Freedom to Write mean to you?”

Each EV Fellow discusses the role that freedom of expression, the keystone of PEN Center USA’s mission, has played in their lives as writers, readers, and literary citizens.

photo: Bill Kennedy

From Soleil David: I come from a people who believe that words can change the world. Even more than that, I come from a people who have proved this. From the struggle for independence from Spain to the overthrow of a dictator, writing has been instrumental to the fall of so many empires. The Philippines is only one of so many examples all over the world. The United States may be on the verge of tyranny, but the good news is that the world has always had the tools to fight. Words can, words will, and words have won against despotic rulers. We just have to be brave enough to write them…

photo: Tyler Coleman

From Jessica Shoemaker: When I was six, my mom gave me a diary. She told me that I could write whatever I wanted in it, and she would never read it. That night I wrote, “Today at school I played with my ball. Me and Bethie roller skated.” I had a friend named Beth, but I never called her Bethie. I just wanted to feel the kind of closeness with somebody that compels a nickname…

photo: Bill Kennedy

From Kirin Khan: When writers are brave, we make others brave. Authoritarian regimes throughout the world know this—this is why they work so hard to spin and discredit, to hurt us or make us disappear. To shut us up one way or another. Writers are truth-seekers, and authoritarians thrive in misinformation. We are all enemies of the state…

photo: Tyler Coleman

From Chinyere Nwodim: Freedom. For a long time, I associated the word with physically being unshackled and unrestrained. For a long time, it held no real value because I didn’t understand what it cost to be free. I didn’t realize that freedom needed to be pushed, stretched, and exercised or it would atrophy like an unused muscle…

photo: Tyler Coleman

From Peter H.Z. Hsu: There’s nothing like a book. Its value is unique, a prolonged experience of engagement with the imagination. Those ratty paperbacks weren’t just an escape. There was something tying those stories together—underdogs and victims rising up and embracing their power, loyal friends banding together to face a great and terrible evil. Scared people doing things they were scared to do…