Slash Pine Press presents Slash Stitch Burn, a weaving of the factual and fictional elements of Tuscaloosa’s patchwork history. This three-part event begins with an 11:00 am reading in the infamous Drish House. At 2:00pm, the reading breaks into two distinct tours (one beginning at the Old Tavern downtown and the other at Alabama Heritage on campus) which ultimately converge at the New Courthouse. Slash Stitch Burn concludes at 7:00 pm with a bonfire reading amid the wilderness of Sokol Park. Some of the noteworthy readers include Laurence Ross, Robin Behn, Daniela Olszewska, Wendy Rawlings, the UA Slash Pine Interns, and Knox College students.

Directions to the Locations:

Readers

Robin Behn is on the faculty of the MFA program here at Alabama and directs the Creative Writing Club open to all high school writers in the Tuscaloosa area. She is the author of six books of poems, most recently The Yellow House.

Laurence Ross attended a North East Catholic prep school for boys. Though the school possesses a more formal name as well as a Patron Saint, the school is locally referred to simply as “The Prep.” This fact, in all likelihood, is all you need to know about him, as it is the sprout from which all else has grown.

Chris Mink was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, AL. He currently sweats buckets through Tallahassee pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Florida State University. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Anti-. Earlier work can be found in a folder his mother keeps.

Andrew Johnson writes fiction and non-fiction. He recently returned from Cuttington University (Liberia), where he was a Visiting Expatriate Assistant Professor in English, teaching West African Anglophone literature and composition. During his two-year sojourn in Liberia, Andy fell victim to an ancient African curse. His healing and recovery form the basis of his upcoming novel, The Covenant of Salt. Born and raised mostly  in New York, Andy spends most of his time traveling between Austin, TX and Tuscaloosa.

Ray Wachter is an instructor in the English Department at UA and also leads a student yoga & meditation group. His work can be found in Tipton Poetry Journal, The Pinch, Apalachee Review, Burnt Bridge, and other online and print publications. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize; he grew up in Iowa and he should probably cut down on how much coffee and Frank O’Hara he consumes.

Eric Parker was born and raised in California. He now lives in Alabama.

Anne Brettell became Tuscaloosa over one year ago, when the children say a woman with a yellow hair comb came peeking under the fence latch – chanting her poems in a pitch too high for adults to hear.

Leia Penina Wilson likes foxes, a lot. If you are a fox, she likes you especially (better yet if you are a fennec fox). But she is already seriously dating, i.e. in love in with an engineering fox, so if you had any plans to commandeer her heart, sorry–already spoken for. To pass the time when she is away from her fox, she lives in a whole and occasionally writes poems in the form of sentences.

Rachel Adams is in the final year of her MFA in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Pank, Corium, Thunderclap Press, and Uncanny Valley. She’s currently working on a patchwork of short pieces set in Tuscaloosa.

Dara Ewing is a Creative Writing MFA at the University of Alabama. She writes primarily fiction and short email messages. She thinks everything Slash Pine Press does benefits the world in a totally unironic way.  She loathes the smart phone because it has rendered petty debate all but obsolete.  Petty debate is her favorite thing. In that spirit, please consider arguing about the real history of the Tuscaloosa Bindery in a mostly congenial way.

Jesse DeLong’s work can be found at or is forthcoming from Best New Poets 2011, The Offending Adam, Copper Nickel, Word Riot, Word For/Word, Nano Fiction, Big Muddy and elsewhere. His chapbook, Tearings, and Other Poems, was released by Curly Head Press.

Juan Carlos Reyes is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Alabama. He writes fiction and he’s published some of it. Sometimes he writes poetry and he publishes that, too. He muses online at faithintheunseen.wordpress.org.

Barry Grass is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Alabama. His work appears recently in Annalemma, Junk, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In light of the name change of his hometown Major League Soccer team from Kansas City Wizards to Sporting Kansas City, he is considering changing his own name to Writing Barry Grass.

Daniela Olszewska is a Pole by birth, a Chicagoan by nature, and an MFA student at the University of Alabama by the grace of God.  She wants you to leave room in your 2012 poetry-buying budgets for her books, Citizen J and cloudfang : : cakedirt, which will be published by Artifice Books and Horse Less Press, respectively.

Chad Simpson is the author of Phantoms, a limited-edition chapbook published by Origami Zoo Press. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Barrelhouse, Esquire, American Short Fiction, and The Sun, among others. He lives in Monmouth, Illinois, and teaches fiction writing and literature classes at Knox College.

Wendy Rawlings teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama and has published two books, The Agnostics and Come Back Irish. Her work has appeared in Tin House, AGNI, The Southern Review, and other magazines. Two of her very favorite things are soap operas and all dogs.

Catherine Pierce is the author of Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008) and the forthcoming The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2011, Slate, Ploughshares, Boston Review, FIELD, Blackbird, and many other magazines and journals. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.