Join us via Zoom on 2/19/23 at 5pm ET for a conversation about publishing first books of fiction and creative nonfiction with Joseph Earl Thomas and Laura Maylene Walter.

Here’s the link to join, no registration required: tinyurl.com/FirstBooksProse.

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame and studies English in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir Sink won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities. He is the current Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing at the CSU Poetry Center.

Laura Maylene Walter is the author of the novel Body of Stars. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, the Horse Girls anthology, and many other publications. She has received grants, awards, or fellowships from Tin House, Yaddo, the Ohio Arts Council, the Ohioana Library Association, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Chautauqua Institution, and Art Omi: Writers. Laura is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library, where she hosts Page Count, a literary podcast.