Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space is a new anthology of poetry, essays, and visual art edited by Matthew Burgess and published by Secretary Press. Contributors reflect on  enclosures from their own childhood—the closet, the fort, the tent of bed sheets, the inverted cardboard box—and explore their various meanings. Whether found or made, these spaces are often sites of privacy, of escape, of aesthetic or erotic self-discovery, and of queer self-identification. This event will include a reading from selected contributors and a short Q&A.

 
Event image by Aram Jibilian.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Post Road, Salon, New York Times, Dissent, Bitch Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers, and she is the recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The MacDowell Colony. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University, MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and serves on the Executive Board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, an Oprah Book of the Week, and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012. His work has also appeared in Tin House Magazine, Open City, H.O.W. Journal, and the Chattahoochee Review, among other publications. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at The New School, where he teaches fiction and is the co-editor of The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food.

Christina Olivares is the author of No Map of the Earth Includes Stars, winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, of the 2015 chaplet Interrupt, produced by Belladonna* Collaborative, and of Petition, winner of the 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Competition. She is the recipient of two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants, a Teachers and Writers Fellowship, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Jason Zuzga is currently finishing a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Other Editor of Fence and the author of the poetry collection HEAT WAKE to be published by Saturnalia Books in March 2016.

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer based in Minneapolis and New York. Her poems and essays have appeared in Fence, Triple Canopy, BOMB, recaps, and elsewhere. She currently teaches feminist and queer theory at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Ian Hatcher is a writer, programmer, and sound artist living in NYC. He is the author of Prosthesis (Poor Claudia 2015), The All-New (Anomalous 2015), and, with Amaranth Borsuk and Kate Durbin, co-creator of Abra, a conjoined artist’s book and iOS app supported by the Center for Book and Paper Arts (Columbia College Chicago). > ianhatcher.net

Ryan Skrabalak is a poet currently living in his hometown of Bethlehem, New York.  You can find past works of his in Slice, Stone Canoe, The Brooklyn Review, By The Overpass, and the two zine series Having A Whiskey Coke With You and Post-Apocalyptic Poets of Deep Brooklyn. Would you like to be friends with him?  Then we can stay up all night and listen to jazz music.

Margaret Douglas is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer currently studying at Brooklyn College. Selected as 2015 Rosen Fellow, Douglas is now experimenting with motion and poetry while hiking sections of the Appalachian Trail and exploring the great wilderness areas of New England. Having grown up in New Hampshire, Douglas is an avid outdoorswoman and tent connoisseur. She now lives as close to Prospect Park as absurd rent costs will allow with her dog, Little Paw, and her cat, Guillermo.