Three poet/fiction writers have a conversation about the apparitional quality of the female figure in literary history and the flickering presence of the narrator in their own new and upcoming books of fiction. Eileen Myles (Inferno (a poet’s novel)), Renee Gladman (The Event Factory), and Laurie Weeks (Zipper Mouth) will also be reading from their writing.

Eileen Myles chronicles the life of a female writer in Inferno (a poet’s novel) out this fall from OR books. She has work in this year’s Best American Poetry, 2010 edited by Amy Gerstler and her books of poetry include Not Me, School of Fish, and Sorry, Tree. Her first fiction was Chelsea Girls (1994), followed by Cool for You (a nonfiction novel) in 2000. She directed the writing program at the University of California at San Diego from 2002–07. She writes reviews, articles, essays, and blogs, most recently in Artforum, Parkett, Vice, AnOther Magazine, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her essays were collected in The Importance of Being Iceland (2009). In 2010, the Poetry Society of American awarded Myles the Shelley Memorial Award. She lives in New York.

Renee Gladman teaches fiction in the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. Since 2005, she has edited and published Leon Works, a press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, with occasional detours into poetry. She is the author of five works of prose, most recently Event Factory (Dorothy, 2011), and one collection of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Her work occupies the interstitial spaces between fiction and poetry and pushes toward cities, architecture, and the confusion of the everyday.

Laurie Weeks is a writer and performer based in New York City. Zipper Mouth (Alyson), her debut novel, will be out this year. Her fiction and essays have been published throughout the United Kingdom and the United States in Vice, The Baffler, Nest, Index, Art on Paper, Out, LA Weekly, Semiotext(e)’s The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading, and most recently, Dave Eggers’s The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008. She was a screenwriter on Boys Don’t Cry. Weeks has taught in the writing programs at UC San Diego, The New School, and in 1996 was awarded a fiction fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts. She holds a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University.