Moderated by OSU Humanities Institute Associate Fred Andrle and Linda Kass, longtime writer, community activist and BCBC Founder and Chair.
Michael Croley has won awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Key West Literary 
Seminars and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. His stories have regularly appeared in Narrative, where he was named a "Best New Writer" of 2011. His fiction and criticism has been published in The Paris Review Daily, Blackbird, The Louisville Review and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Denison University.
Michelle Herman is the author of the novels Missing and Dog, the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, three essay collections—The
Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and the forthcoming Like A Song—andA Girl's Guide to Life, a book for children. Her many awards and honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship and teaching awards from Ohio State, where she directs the MFA program in Creative Writing.
Elizabeth Heym, a 2014 Bexley High School graduate and current freshman at Ohio State majoring in engineering, finds that the logic and symmetry of STEM inform her writing. She has been published in The Best Teen Writing of 2013 and The Best Teen Writing of 2014, among other literary magazines. Liz is currently mentored by the first poet laureate of Utah, David Lee.
Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic radiologist specializing in nuclear medicine with Mt. Carmel. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Norton Introduction to Literature, and The Best of the Best American Poetry1988-2012. His novels are Partitions and The Abundance, and his poetry collections are 0’, 0’ and Heaven and Earth.
Izetta Nicole Thomas is the winner of the 2013 Columbus Arts Festival poetry competition. She has performed in local and regional poetry slams since 2007, and earned the right to compete as a member of the Writers Block team in the National Poetry Slam in 2011. The former co-host of the “Speaking of Poetry” radio show, Ms. Thomas is a special needs preschool teacher with Columbus City Schools.
Actor Christopher Austin recently performed as Walter Lee Younger in SRO Theater's production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” and is a recipient of 2013 Theater Roundtable and Jebby Awards for his portrayal of John in Gallery Players/New Players Theater’s award-winning production of “The Whipping Man.”
Moderators will be Linda Kass, longtime writer, community activist and BCBC Founder and Chair, and Fred Andrle, a poet who for 20 years hosted the WOSU radio show “Open Line.” He is an associate of the OSU Humanities Institute.
This event is produced in partnership with the Bexley Community Book Club.
