This month’s Franklin Park Reading Series will take place on Monday June 29th and features authors:

Felicia Sullivan (The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here)
Rachel Shukert (Have You No Shame?)
Dan Fontaine (comedian; National Lampoon contributor)

Curated by Crown Heights’ own Penina Roth, the Franklin Park Reading Series is quickly becoming the go-to literary event in the borough. Roth’s ability to cull a unique blend of established and emerging writers has FPRS poised to become Brooklyn’s equivalent of the famed KGB reading series.

Participants in this month’s event come from starkly different backgrounds, both culturally and geographically. Felicia Sullivan, author of the bold and searing memoir The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here, grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, fending for herself and parenting her drug-addicted mother. Playwright and performer Rachel Shukert looks back on her surreal childhood as a middle class Jew in Omaha, Nebraska in her hilarious and mordant memoir Have You No Shame?. With wry wit and an astutely observant eye, comedian and National Lampoon contributor Dan Fontaine recalls his upbringing in Daleville, Alabama, where the population hovers just north of 5000.

FELICIA SULLIVAN is the author of the memoir The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here, which has been featured in Vanity Fair, Elle, USA Today, Redbook, Newsday and The Washington Post. Sullivan received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from Tin House magazine and SLS Literary Seminars. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines, and literary journals. In 2001, she founded the critically-acclaimed literary journal Small Spiral Notebook and was the co-founder of the KGB Non Fiction Reading Series. A New York City resident, she is adapting her memoir for the screen and completing a novel, Women and Children First.

“This extraordinary memoir strikes me as a considerable moral, human, and artistic achievement. It will keep you awake at night and haunt your dreams.”
–Dani Shapiro, author of Family History and Slow Motion

RACHEL SHUKERT is a playwright, author and sometime performer based in New York City. Her first book, Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories, was published in 2008, and The Grand Tour, a memoir about her two-year sojourn in Europe, will be released in 2010. Her plays include Bloody Mary (NYIT Award nominee), The Worshipped, The Red Beard of Esau and Sequins for Satan, and have been produced and developed at theaters including Ars Nova, the Williamstown Theater Festival, Soho Think Tank/Ice Factory and the EVOLVE Series at Galapogos. She is a co-founder and co-artistic director of the theater group the Bushwick Hotel. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Gawker, Nerve, Heeb, McSweeney’s and Babble, and she’s contributed to several anthologies, including The Best Sex Writing of 2008 and The Best American Erotic Poems.

“At times bawdy, at times bleak, Rachel Shukert’s laugh-out-loud-funny and gloriously written coming-of-age portrait will remind you of other precocious youngsters with morbid streaks — think of The Royal Tenenbaums and Salinger’s Glass family contemplating their annihilation over brisket.”
–Joshua Neuman, publisher of Heeb

DAN FONTAINE is a comedian and humor writer. His literal and observational humor gives audiences a candid look inside the person onstage. He’s captivated crowds around the country with routines that veer from mundane observations to ridiculous circumstances of chance. Fontaine was a regular performer at the Funny Farm Comedy Club in Atlanta. He now calls New York City home and is a member of the Saints and Sinners Comedy Tour and a contributing writer for National Lampoon. He’s also the founder of “Substantial Stand Up”, a production company dedicated to the growth of stand up comedy and stand up comedians.

FPRS is Free and features drink specials. Franklin Park is accessible via Subway: 2/3/4/5 trains to Franklin Avenue and on the web: franklinparkbrooklyn.com

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