Pen Parentis to Host Holiday Mingle, 12/9

The Pen Parentis Literary Salon celebrates the holiday season in high style! The December salon is a mingling soirée with wine and appetizers compliments of the Hotel Andaz Wall Street, featuring live music by award-winning jazz guitarist Wilson Montuori and stories from four prolific authors at varying points in their parenting lives and writing careers. Featuring Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of the novel Somebody's Daughter, Yona Zeldis McDonough, author, most recently, of the novel You Were Meant For Me, Bushra Rehman, author of the novel Corona and co-editor of the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, and Raina Wallens, young adult novelist who has written for a variety of online publications, including The Huffington Post. Each author will read from their work and then participate in a salon-style roundtable about their work and lives. The annual Author Mingle celebrates the creative work of writers that are also parents, and is a great place to pick up signed copies of the authors' books.

The celebration takes place on Tuesday, December 9th at the elegant Hotel Andaz at 75 Wall Street. The night kicks off at 7:00 pm, and admission is free. RSVP is recommended, but not required-the Pen Parentis Literary Salon is open to adults over the age of 21. The authors' books are available for purchase from The Park Slope Community Bookstore.

December 9th's Holiday Author Mingle features:

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the novel Somebody's Daughter. Her next novel is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster and has been excerpted in Five Chapters and The KGB Bar Lit Journal. Marie's essays have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Salon. She was the first recipient of a creative writing Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea and has won the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship and the Richard Margolis award for social justice reporting. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and teaches creative writing at Columbia University, where she is the Our Word Writer-in-Residence. She is a founder and the former board president of the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York City.

Yona Zeldis McDonough was raised in Brooklyn, NY and educated at Vassar College and Columbia University. She is the award-winning author of six novels for adults and 23 books for children and her essays, articles and short fiction have appeared in a number of literary and national publications. She has also edited two essay collections and is the fiction editor of Lilith Magazine. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn with her husband and their two children.

Bushra Rehman's first novel Corona, a dark comedy about being South Asian in the United States, was included in Poets & Writers Best Debut Fiction issue of 2013, was a LAMBDA finalist for 2014, and featured in the LA Review of Books among a new wave of radical South Asian American Literature. Rehman co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, included in Ms. Magazine's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.

Raina Wallens is the author of seven young adult books, published under pseudonyms. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and Ozy.com, amongst others. A mother of one and stepmother of two, Raina splits her time between New York and New Jersey.

Wilson Montuori (guitar) holds a BFA in music from City College of New York, where he won the prestigious "Sidney Zolot Award," given each year to a graduating music major who has demonstrated excellence as a performer. He has toured worldwide and recorded two CDs with Livio Guardi, the latest titled "Diomedee" is a collection of songs and instrumentals inspired by the Mediterranean Sea. He records extensively for 2soul Music Incorporation, plays lead guitar in the folk-rock band of Irish singer-songwriter Allen Gogarty, in the Italian musical group "I giullari di piazzi", and with famous remo percussionist Alessandra Belloni.

More info at penparentis.org.