Moss Volume 5 Launch
Pacific Northwest literary journal Moss is bringing its green, fuzzy tendrils from across the region together in their first-ever online event.
Celebrate their brand-new fifth volume with readings from award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, writer and scholar Beth Piatote, poet and editor Malcolm Friend, and Moss poetry editor Ashley Toliver.
Click on the “Tickets” link to RSVP to the Zoom event.
About the Readers
Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar, before moving to Canada. He worked as a journalist at the Globe and Mail, and his coverage of a 2006 terror plot earned him a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Reporting. His other journalistic work includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantánamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He has also received the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. He is a graduate of Queen’s University. He now lives with his wife in the woods just south of Portland, Oregon. His debut novel, American War, was published in 2017 and won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction, as well as being a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke award.
Beth Piatote is an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of California Berkeley and the author of the short story collection The Beadworkers. She holds a PhD from Stanford University, is the author of numerous scholarly essays and creative works, and is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships. She is Nez Perce enrolled with Colville Confederated Tribes and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two children.
Malcolm Friend is a poet from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), selected by Cynthia Arrieu-King as winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. He has received awards from organizations including CantoMundo, Backbone Press, the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, the Frost Place, and the University of Memphis. His work can be found in publications including La Respuesta magazine, the Fjords Review’s Black American Edition, Vinyl, Word Riot, and the Acentos Review, among others. He works at the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting lecturer and serves as a poetry editor for FreezeRay Poetry.
Ashley Toliver is the author of Spectra (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the 2018 Believer Book Awards. She teaches poetry at the The Attic Institute in southeast Portland and serves as poetry editor at Moss. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013.
