New Partnership!
Reading at the Wardensville Garden Market
Lost River Writers’ Retreat
CABIN READS returned this summer – now in partnership with the nonprofit, youth-powered farm WARDENSVILLE GARDEN MARKET – with a second annual reading by the LOST RIVER WRITERS’ RETREAT. Participants in this year’s loveliest of readings were:
MATTHEW ALBERSWERTH is a recent graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA for writers. He currently lives in his hometown of Washington DC.
JOHN COPENHAVER’S debut novel, Dodging and Burning, will be published by Pegasus Books (Pegasus Crime) in March 2018. For three consecutive years, he has been awarded an Artist Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 2015, he won the Larry Neal Writers’ Award for short fiction, judged by Alice McDermott, and launched a new crime fiction column for the Lambda Literary website called “Blacklight.” His fiction has appeared in various literary magazines, including Glitterwolf and Gaslight. He is Lambda Literary Fellow and received his MFA in fiction from George Mason. He chairs the 7-12 English Department at Flint Hill School in Oakton, VA. He lives with his husband and two insanely photogenic dogs in Washington, DC.
ERIKA NICHOLS-FRAZER is an MFA student in Fiction at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars, as well as the Communications Manager of the Children’s Literacy Foundation. She writes fiction, poetry, and the occasional essay, and her work has appeared in Runaway Parade, Haggard & Halloo, and Please Do Not Remove: A Collection Celebrating Literature and Libraries, as well as in several of the Best of the Burlington Writers Workshop’s anthologies. She also served as the poetry editor for that publication’s debut issue. Erika holds a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Waitsfield, Vermont with her husband, dogs, and chickens.
KAREN SOSNOSKI’S fiction and nonfiction, most recently in Argot Magazine, Sunlight Press (pending) and on Romper, explores what happens when people face their limitations through disability, illness, sports, or other intense encounters (such as art). Her work has also appeared in the LA Times, Poets and Writers, Word Riot, Grappling, Bitch, Radioactive Moat, decomp, Identity Theory, Chaffee Review, Yellow Mama, Psychology Today, Camroc Review and on Studio 360, This American Life and Boundoff. Berkeley Media distributes her documentary film, “Wedding Advice: Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace.” Her story “Too Sweet” is published in the seventh anthology (Fall 2016) in the Grace & Gravity series of fiction by Washington, DC-area women. A mother, disabilities advocate, and Special Ed PTA board member, Karen is working on a novel Elizabeth Hillman’s Teeth about a poorly connected, adjunct English instructor who disavows her life-long meekness to avenge a famous artist she believes has stolen her destiny.
ROSS WHITE is the author of How We Came Upon the Colony and The Polite Society. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, New England Review, and other literary journals. He serves as the Poetry Editor for Four Way Review and Director of Bull City Press. The winner of the 2016 Larry Levis Postgraduate Fellowship from Warren Wilson College, Ross teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Join me as I host CABIN READS again this year. I’ll introduce some of my favorite people to the tiny Appalachian town of Wardensville in the eastern panhandle of WV when the authors of the LOST RIVER WRITERS’ RETREAT read from their works in progress at the LOST RIVER TRADING POST on AUGUST 2nd at 6pm.
I vividly recall my kindergarten teacher handing us a form to indicate what we wanted to be when we grow up. There were different careers listed in the boy column vs. the girl column. (It was 1970.) The closest thing I could find that matched me was in the boy column, so I nervously picked it: Cowboy. I have definitely been fighting stereotypes ever since. Because no child should feel uncomfortable being who they are, my Read #3 is FLYING LESSONS & OTHER STORIES, fullof diverse authors and protagonists, just as it should be. My favorite so far is 
