Thursday Aug 21, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
A Celebration of Independent Publishing.
Join us for a night celebrating six authors from six independent presses, each offering a distinct voice shaped outside the confines of commercial publishing. The evening will feature short readings and a conversation on the possibilities and urgencies of independent literature, followed by a post-event reception.
About the Presses.
Astra Publishing House is dedicated to publishing books for children and adults that
celebrate excellent storytelling, have a strong point of view, and introduce readers to
new perspectives about their everyday lives as well as the lives of others.
Autofocus Books is a publisher of artful autobiographical writing in any genre or form:
personal essay, memoir, autofiction, confessional poetry, journals & diaries, letters & e-mails, image-text, mashups of some of these things, and/or any other thing that makes art directly from the life of its writer. The press specializes in relatively brief books that fit, and occasionally stretch, the boundaries of our literary interests.
Joyland Editions is a nonprofit independent press founded in 2025. Joyland Editions
publishes two novellas every year.
LittlePuss Press is a feminist press run by trans women.
Melville House is an independent publisher located in Brooklyn, New York.
Rose Books was founded by writer Chelsea Hodson in 2022 in Sedona, Arizona.
About the Readers.
E.N. Couturier is an award-winning journalist and recreational farmer. Organic Matter is her first book. Her work has appeared in numerous Maine news outlets, on local radio and in publications including New World Writing, Peripheries, Eclectica Magazine, FRiGG, and jmww, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.
Sasha Fletcher is the author of, most recently, the novel Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World. He lives in Brooklyn.
Matthew Gasda is a writer, director, and critic. He is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of the novel The Sleepers, and two collections of plays, among other works.
Cora Lewis is the author of the novella Information Age, published in July 2025 by
Joyland Editions. Her short stories have appeared in The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, The Cleveland Review of Books, Reed Magazine, The Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press and lives near Sunset Park.
Cora Lewis is the author of the novella Information Age, published in July 2025 by
Joyland Editions. Her short stories have appeared in The Yale Review, Joyland
Magazine, Epiphany, The Cleveland Review of Books, Reed Magazine, The Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press and lives near Sunset Park.
Emily Zhou’s first book, Girlfriends, won the 2023 Publishing Triangle’s Leslie Feinberg Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction. She is the “Editrix-At-Large” at LittlePuss Press and a fiction editor at Joyland Magazine. Her shorter writing has appeared in Literary Hub, e-flux journal, Xtra, Club Curran, and a few other places. She lives in New York.
About the Moderator.
Lena Crown is a writer, editor, and educator from Northern California. She currently
produces, edits and hosts Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts, and is an editor at Autofocus.
Michelle Lyn King is a writer and editor, and the founder of Joyland Editions.