Letters Festival Friday Night Reading at Lostintheletters

Join us on Friday, November 13, for readings from Donna Mintz, Kristen Gleason, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador! Don't miss the night of incredible readings from Donna Mintz, Kristen Gleason, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador! Donna Mintz, author of Stars at Noon (Mercer University Press, 2026), a meditation on art and beauty inspired by the life and work of the writer James Agee, is a visual artist who writes about art and literature. Her painting and installation resides in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Mobile Museum of Art, and is widely represented in public and private collections nationally and abroad. Her writing has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Swing, and the arts journals Burnaway.org and ArtsATL.org. Kristen Gleason is the author of the short story collection The Wallet and Other Thefts (Fonograf Editions). Her fiction appears in McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Her story “Mumbai” won BOMB’s Biannual Fiction Contest, and her story “The Refugee” was the North American winner of The White Review Short Story Prize. She has been a Writing Fellow at A Public Space and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to northern Norway. Recently, she received The Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing, Teaching and Publishing. She lives in Athens, Georgia. Maurice Carlos Ruffin, a Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of National Bestseller, The American Daughters, as well as The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a One Book One New Orleans selection, which was longlisted for the Story Prize. His debut, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. All three books were New York Times Editor’s Choice selections. Ruffin is the winner of the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the Louisiana Writer Award. Ruffin is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. Born and raised in México, Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador is a poet, editor, researcher, and translator. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Letras Latinas, The Kenyon Review Workshop, McCormack Writing Center, Community of Writers, among others. Lola is a PhD student at Emory University and a poetry reader for Poetry Northwest. She is working on her first poetry manuscript, which explores narco-violence, embodied memory, religion, and desire.