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WELCOME TO A DRAMATIC LITERARY READING featuring selections from the first (EVER) all women’s anthology of tragicomic fiction. The St Petersburg Seven present innovative and insightful dramatic fiction dealing with pain and passion, love and life’s epiphanies and momentous moments, tropisms and tremors, relationships and revelations. Each author masterfully plays with comedy and tragedy showing us how these forms date, engage, and no-nup marry.

Mona Awad, was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. She is a writer of short stories, poems, screenplays in addition to having worked extensively as a journalist. Mona’s fiction and articles have appeared in a variety of publications, among them: The Walrus, Utne Reader, Maisonneuve, Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tidings, onAir and Matrix where she was the winner and recipient of the Matrix/SLS Editors’ Choice Award for Fiction in 2009. Mona is currently finishing her MScR in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Much of Mona’s work focuses on the seismic psychosexual, and the tragicomic details, twists and turns that occur in personal, social and family encounters and relationships.

Naveen Bahar Choudhury, playwright and fiction writer, was born in Washington, D.C. and now lives in NYC. Her plays have been produced and developed by venues such as Ensemble Studio Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, The Lark Play Development Center, The New Federal Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Source, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and Desipina & Co. Naveen was a finalist for The Public Theater’s 2008 Time Warner Emerging Writers Group. As an active participant in the South Asian American theatre community, a member of SALAAM Theatre, and alumna member of Desipina & Co., Naveen’s work explores female anti-heroes, and the lives of 21st Century American immigrants and their descendants from a tragicomic perspective. Naveen received her MFA in playwriting from the Actors Studio Drama School & is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

Jackie Delamatre, born in Louisiana, is an educator at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum. Jackie has taught fiction writing for ,Brooklyn’s Sackett Street Writers Workshop, and New York University from which she holds an MFA in the same subject. Jackie’s work relies on her observations of friends and relatives. She focuses on details of neuroses and expands from there to make as many assessments of the world as she can glean from such a small sample size. Jackie pays as much close attention to plot as she can muster and far more to her characters’ insides. Jackie has been published in New York Press and CapGun, among other publications.

Christina Nichol spent most of her twenties studying animal husbandry in the former Soviet Republics. Retiring from her life as a Kyrgyz yak herder, she now lives in Florida where she is getting her MFA in creative writing and studying how to herd alligators. Christina has worked on documentary projects and has just completed a tragicomic novel set in the Republic of Georgia. It has been described as containing “crystalline descriptions of the everyday life in Georgia.” Christina’s highly original work is full of dark humor, and has been called “impressively fluid,” with the ability to evoke the totally absurd.

Faye Ran, born in Havana, Cuba, is a professor of literature, media and cultural studies, a writer/director, & art curator of a small NYC SoHo gallery. Faye, a former Fulbright Theatre Scholar, AFI Screenwriting Fellow and winner of the Goodman Award for Playwriting, has in hyphenated capacities as a producer/writer/ director produced over 100 plays, films, videos, and multimedia productions on Off-Off Broadway and at international theatre & art festivals and curated over 175 art exhibitions. Her book, The Tragi-comic Passion, is a history & analysis of tragicomedy & tragicomic characterization in drama, film and literature. Both Faye’s creative and academic work reflect an interest in new genres, experimental narrative and hybridity of form. Faye has two PhDs (Columbia University in English & Comparative Literature & NYU in Media Ecology- Culture & Communication) 7 Masters, and an MBA (like Yentl but without the singing).

Rebecca Schiff, a native New Yorker, lives and teaches in Brooklyn. Sam Lipsyte has described her work as “quick, funny, heartbreaking and mean, usually all at once.” Rebecca holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she received a Henfield Award and a Berg Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Fence, Guernica and in the anthology Lost and Found: Stories from New York. She is currently an adjunct instructor of English at Kingsborough Community College. Rebecca spends a lot of time thinking about the sentence, both when writing fiction and when grading student work. Her work is both achingly poignant and funny at the same time.

Izida Zorde is a Russian-born writer, curator, and the editor of FUSE magazine — an arts and culture magazine based in Toronto. Working for the past ten years as an editor and curator in the visual arts, Izida’s critical work explores politically engaged arts practices, neo-liberal economics and participatory democratic models. As a fiction writer, Izida’s strikingly original series of stories tell the tragicomic history and struggles of a family that immigrates from Russia to Winnipeg ten years before the fall of Soviet Communism and on the dime of United Jewish Appeal (PROUD TO ASK! PROUD TO GIVE!). Izida received her Masters in Sociology from the University of Toronto and studied translation at Moscow State University.