Spillers

Patrick Michael Finn reads his story, The Wreckage of Better Days, and then connects some very serious dots between its main characters and his personal struggle with bipolar disorder. Patrick Michael Finn is the author of the novella "A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich" and the story collection "From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet." A native of Joliet, Illinois, Finn has lived in the desert Southwest since 1989—with the exception of a four-year voyage that took him to a farmhouse on the Nebraska-Wyoming border and to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. He has lived in the East Valley of Metro Phoenix for the last ten years, where he's currently working on a novel and a collection of stories.

Venita Blackburn talks about the struggles for a writer of color and her workshop on the subject, and reads her story Chew, featured in her upcoming collection, Black Jesus and Other Superhero Stories, out in September 2017. Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Georgia Review, Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, Nashville Review, Smoke Long Quarterly, Café Irreal, Santa Monica Review, Faultline, Devil’s Lake Review, Nat.Brut., Bellevue Literary Review, audio download through Bound Off, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and three Pushcart prize nominations. In 2016 she received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction 2016, which will result in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. Her home town is Compton, California, but she now lives and teaches in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned her MFA from Arizona State University in 2008, and is finishing a new novel, Guts.

Spillers: Fiction Out Loud by Robert Hoekman Jr