Dorothy Parker Read Here, Inaugural Reading
Dorothy Parker Read Here
Women’s History Month Literary Reading
3/22/26· 2:00 p.m. · Core’s Tavern, Halcyon Park, Bloomfield
PROGRAM
Welcome & Opening Remarks
Welcome and overview of the evening — 5 minutes
Women’s History Committee
Introduction of the Committee — 5 minutes
Special Remarks
Address from the Mayor — 5 minutes
Limited Open Reading
Nancy Burke — 5 minutes
Featured Readers
Kem
Introduced by Host — Reading 17 minutes
Apryl
Introduced by Co‑Host — Reading 17 minutes
Grisel
Introduced by Host — Reading 17 minutes
Kimberly
Introduced by Co‑Host — Reading 17 minutes
Roundtable Conversation
Group discussion with featured readers — 10 minutes
Closing Reader
Final limited open reader — 5 minutes
Reception
Book signing, book sales, and informal networking
Bios’ of readers
Kem Joy Ukwu’s short story collection, Locked Gray / Linked Blue: Stories published by Kindred Books Imprint of Brain Mill Press, won a 2018 Foreword INDIES Award (Bronze Winner in Literary). Her fiction has appeared in Auburn Avenue, PANK, Jabberwock Review, Carve, and Blue Lake Review, among other literary publications. Her TV Script, POWER OUT, won the Grand Prize for the 60-Minute Pilot Teleplay Competition of the 2025 Mystic Film Festival, was an Official Selection for the 2023 Essence Film Festival, among other notations, and her novel manuscript of the same title was longlisted for the 2023 and 2025 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.
Apryl Lee is a writer, educator, and trained voice actor whose work has appeared in New Orleans Review, Joyland, Necessary Fiction, and Craft Literary, among others. A 2021 Rona Jaffe scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she teaches creative writing and screenwriting and co-founded the Halfway There reading series in Montclair, New Jersey. Her screenplays have been selected for Cannes, Sundance Institute’s Screenwriter’s Lab, and New Filmmakers at Anthology Film Archives, and she earned a Webby Award in 2023 for her script writing on the Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls podcast.
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is the author of Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere (Get Fresh, 2021), an Andres Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, and Wild (FlowerSong Press, late 2026). She is the editor of the anthology, Latina Outsiders (Routledge, 2019), which was listed by NBC Latino’s Hispanic Heritage Month Picks. They are a 2025 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship recipient, Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal, & a Poetry Editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly. Select work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Acentos Review, and Hopkins Review.
Kim Coleman Foote is the author of Coleman Hill (SJP Lit/Zando), named a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and NAACP Image Award, among others. Her next novel, Salt Water Sister, anticipated in 2027, chronicles women’s resistance to slavery in 1700s West Africa and a fight for reparations in the present day. Kim has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Center for Fiction, and elsewhere, and her fiction and essays have appeared most recently in The Best American Short Stories 2022, Ecotone, The Rumpus, and Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices.
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