This month's Grotto Night at the Library features a special Women's History Month theme with Audrey T. Williams, Nina Schuyler, Jenny Bitner and Ethel Rohan writing about mothers and daughters.

Audrey T. Williams, MFA identifies as a Black woman with Indo-Burmese heritage. She is a published poet, wellness workshop facilitator, and Reiki Master Teacher. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and is currently completing a certificate in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Trained by The Institute for Poetic Medicine, she facilitates “Poetry as a Tool for Wellness” to foster radical resilience and self-nurturing through creative writing. Audrey’s dedication to the healing power of words is evident in her memberships with the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, Page Street in Berkeley, and the Transformative Language Arts Network. Her current projects are a memoir-in-progress, a speculative flash fiction collection, and a poetry chapbook on the theme of caregiving. 

Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. Her novel, Afterword, won the 2024 PenCraft Book of the Year in Fiction, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary, and the PenCraft Spring Seasonal Book Award for Literary and Science Fiction. Her novel, The Translator, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her books, How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal are bestsellers. 

Jenny Bitner’s fiction and poetry has been published in Mississippi Review, The Fabulist, The Sun, Fence, Corium, Fourteen Hills, Mid-American Review, and PANK. Pine Press published a chapbook of her poetry entitled Mother. Her story “The Pamphleteer” was published in Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her work was also included in the anthology Writing That Risks. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Virginia. She is also a certified hypnotherapist and teaches Trancewriting classes combining hypnosis and writing craft. Her novel Here Is A Game We Could Play was published in 2021 from Acre Books. She is currently finishing an autofiction novel. 

Ethel Rohan is an award-winning essayist, novelist, and short story writer. The author of five books, her second novel, Sing, I, published in April 2024 (TriQuarterly Books). Born and raised in Ireland, she's a longtime San Francisco resident who has yet to perfect sourdough bread.

Connect:

Audrey T. Williams - Website

Jenny Bitner - Website

Nina Schuyler - Website

Ethel Rohan - Website

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