MFA@FLA alums Emma Smith-Stevens and Rachel Khong return to Gainesville! They will be reading from their debut novels, THE AUSTRALIAN and GOODBYE, VITAMIN. We really couldn't be more excited!

EMMA SMITH-STEVENS grew up in New York City and has worked as a server at a pancake house in Delray Beach, Florida, a gift-wrapper in Boca Raton, a personal assistant in Los Angeles, and an instructor at the University of Florida, Santa Fe College, and the Bard College Prison Initiative.

Smith-Stevens' writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Literary Hub, Subtropics, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. Her short story "An August in the Early 2000's," published in Wigleaf, received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses (2016), and her work was selected for inclusion in Wigleaf 's Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions in 2013 and 2012. Her essay, "The Sun," will be included in the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture (Eds. Roxane Gay and Ashley C. Ford), forthcoming from Harper Perennial. She is a graduate of Bard College and the University of Florida's MFA program in creative writing. She lives in New York with her husband, Sebastian, and their two dogs.

The Australian (Dzanc Books) is her first novel, and Greyhounds (Dzanc Books), a story collection forthcoming in early 2018.

http://emmasmithstevens.com/

RACHEL KHONG grew up in Southern Caifornia and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of LUCKY PEACH magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, Joyland, American Short Fiction, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and California Sunday. She lives in San Francisco.

Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel. Find her on Twitter @rachelkhong, or on Instagram @rrrrrrrachelkhong (7 Rs! Yes, she regrets it).

http://www.rachelkhong.com/