Authors Night at Montage

Authors Night on Friday February 21st will be a star-studded affair! Three well-known writers from the Dayton area will read and discuss their literature. They are Sharon Short, Erin Flanagan, and Martha Moody. As always, Authors Night is sponsored by the Friends of the Library and is held at Montage in downtown Greenville. Doors open at 6:00 and the program starts at 7:00. Come early, have supper, listen to everyone’s favorite band, J.R. Price and Bill Westfall, and chat with friends and the authors.

Sharon Short is the author of My One Square Inch of Alaska (Penguin Plume) in which a pair of siblings escape the strictures of the 1950s industrial Ohio town on the adventure of a lifetime. Opening chapters of this novel earned Sharon an Ohio Arts Council individual artist's grant and a Montgomery County (Ohio) Arts & Cultural District Literary Artist Fellowship. Sharon is the Literary Life columnist for the Dayton Daily News and the Executive Director of the renowned Antioch Writers' Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Sharon's book Sanity Check: A Collection of Columns includes 100 reader-favorites of her weekly humor and lifestyle column that ran in the Dayton Daily News from 2002-2012. Sharon has also published two mystery series (Josie Toadfern and Patricia Delaney) as well as short stories and essays. Sharon holds a B.A. in English from Wright State University and an M.A. in English from Bowling Green State University. She lives in Ohio with her husband and is the mother of two adult daughters. See http://sharonshort.blogspot.com.

Erin Flanagan is the author of two short story collections—It’s Not Going to Kill You, and Other Stories and The Usual Mistakes. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Colorado Review, Connecticut Review, Crazyhorse, the Best New American Voices anthology series, and elsewhere. She has held fellowships to Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the UCross Foundation. She is an associate professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. For more information than you’d ever want to know, please visit her website at www.erinflanagan.net.

Martha Moody was born and raised in Ohio and has lived in Dayton with her husband and sons since 1988. Her latest novel, Sharp and Dangerous Virtues, is set in Dayton in 2047. In Moody's book much of Ohio, in order to feed the rest of the country, has been transformed into a dedicated agricultural area. Now this area, known as the Heartland Grid, is threatened from outside by an alliance of other countries and from inside by Gridians who want to form a country of their own. Moody's previous novels include the best-selling Best Friends (a Target "Book-Marked" selection) and Sometimes Mine. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and volunteers regularly teaching writing to at-risk youth in Dayton and English to Arab-Israeli young people in the Galilee. See www.marthamoody.net.