Lydia Davis, Mark Strand, Sigrid Nunez Celebrate Pushcart Press

THE WRITERS STUDIO READING SERIES celebrates The Pushcart Press and the release of the 2012 Pushcart Prize xxVI, Best of The Small Press with readings by LYDIA DAVIS, SIGRID NUNEZ, MARK STRAND and Susan Wheeler.

Introduction by editor and founder Bill Henderson
Book signing to follow reading

WHEN: SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4 @ 5:00 pm (doors open at 4:00 pm)
WHERE: LE POISSON ROUGE, 158 Bleecker Street (at Thompson) NYC www.lprnyc.com
TICKETS: $10 admission at door - One drink or food item minimum
www.writerstudio.com / 212-255-7075

LYDIA DAVIS's story collections include Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, a Village Voice favorite; and Almost No Memory, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Davis is the acclaimed translator of Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust, and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published in 2009 by FSG. She was the recipient of a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship and teaches at SUNY Albany, where she is also a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute.

SIGRID NUNEZ has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.Among the many journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, Harper's,McSweeney's, The Believer, Tin House, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her honors and awards include three Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. www.sigridnunez.com

MARK STRAND Blizzard of One), and the Bollingen Prize. In 1990 he was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Susan Wheeler is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Assorted Poems from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a novel, Record Palace. Her sixth collection, Meme, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2012. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Princeton University. www.susanwheeler.org

Published every year since 1976, THE PUSHCART PRIZE - BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES series - is the most honored literary project in America. Hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in the pages of its annual collections. Writers who were first noticed here include: Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, CharLes Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving, Rick Moody, and many more. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. "How has this series, published from an 8' x 8' backyard shack and staffed by hundreds of unpaid volunteers across the country, survived and thrived for over three decades? The commercial world informs us that this is an impossible dream. Oligarchs pick our entertainments, our celebrities, our presidents and our wars. We children of the spirit are yesterday's news, if we ever were news. Yet for over three decades the Pushcart Prize - and the small presses and authors we honor - have flourished. The reason? (Simple, stupid). Spirit will never be quelled, certainly not by big bucks and bluster. Each edition of the Pushcart Prize is evidence of this. Many new presses and dozens of new authors emerge annually. And so the Pushcart Prize has been renewed since our first edition in 1976. We celebrate this renewal every year. This is our joy." --Bill Henderson, Publisher/Editor

Founded in 1986 by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz, THE WRITERS STUDIO welcomes beginning and advanced students to ongoing writing workshops whose sole purpose is to help fiction writers and poets discover and nurture their own voices. It is founded on the belief that when the desire is strong enough, anyone can learn the technique necessary for full creative expression. 10-week workshops are offered in New York City, San Francisco, Tucson, Amsterdam and online. Since its inception in 1996, The Writers Studio Reading Series has featured numerous writers and poets, including, among others, Carl Dennis, Jennifer Egan, Julia Glass, Edward Hirsch, Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes, Matthew Klam, Etgar Keret, Marie Ponsot, Robert Pinsky, Grace Schulman, Gary Shteyngart, Monique Truong, Colson Whitehead, Yehuda Amichai, as well as The Pushcart Prize, the Kenyon Review, Pequod Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, and the Yale Review.