Jolene McIlwain presents SIDLE CREEK, with April Bradley, Beth Gilstrap, Nazanin Knudsen & Heather Bell Adams at Flyleaf Books

This talented panel of authors will read from their recent works — 5 authors, 5 minute readings each — followed by an evening of conversation to celebrate the recent publication of McIlwain’s debut short story collection, Sidle Creek.

Set in the bruised, mined, and timbered hills of Appalachia in western Pennsylvania, Sidle Creek is a tender, truthful exploration of a small town and the people who live there, told by a brilliant new voice in fiction.

In Sidle Creek, McIlwain skillfully interrogates the myths and stereotypes of the mining, mill, and farming towns where she grew up. With stories that take place in diners and dive bars, town halls and bait shops, McIlwain’s writing explores themes of class, work, health, and trauma, and the unexpected human connections of small, close-knit communities. All the while, the wild beauty of the natural world weaves its way in, a source of the town’s livelihood – and vulnerable to natural resource exploitation.

Jolene McIlwain’s writing appears widely in literary journals and the Best Small Fictions anthology. Her writing has been nominated for several Pushcarts and she was named finalist for Best of the Net, Glimmer Train’s New Writer’s Award, and Arts & Letters Unclassifiables contest. Jolene was also a semifinalist in Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize and both American Short Fiction’s Short and Short(er) Fiction contests. Her debut short story collection, SIDLE CREEK, was published this spring by Melville House. It has received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and reviews from The Associated Press and NPR. Jolene McIlwain was born, raised, and currently lives in western PA.

April Bradley is a Durham, North Carolina-based writer and editor. Her writing appears in Blink Ink, Cheap Pop, CRAFT, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, jmww, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Narratively, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She is the editor and publisher of RUBY, serves as a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, and is an emerita associate editor of fiction at Pidgeonholes. A graduate of Eckerd College and Yale Divinity School, April is a master’s clinical counseling student at William & Mary. Find her online at aprilbradley.com and on Twitter at @april_bradley.

Beth Gilstrap is the author of Deadheading & Other Stories(2021), Winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize and short-listed for the Stanford Libraries William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. Born and raised near Charlotte, she recently relocated to the Charleston-metro area. She also lives with c-PTSD and is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Naz Knudsen is an Iranian-American writer and filmmaker. She holds an MFA in Writing and an MA in Media Arts. Her writing appears in publications such as Pidgeonholes, Ruminate, Mayday, (mac)ro(mic), and Lost Balloon, and was nominated for Best Microfiction series. She edits at Sugarsugarsalt literary magazine and is an Assistant Prose Editor for The ASP Bulletin. Naz lives in Durham, NC, and is an assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Find her at nazknudsen.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @nazbk.

Heather Bell Adams is the author of Maranatha Road and The Good Luck Stone. Her short fiction. which has won the Doris Betts Prize, along with other awards, appears in the North Carolina Literary Review, Still: The Journal, Parentheses, The Thomas Wolfe Review, Atticus Review, The Petigru Review, Broad River Review, and elsewhere. She recently served as the 2022 Piedmont Laureate and the 2023 Pat Conroy Writer-in-Residence.