Pen Parentis After-Work Reading Series Welcomes Rebecca Barry and Cara Hoffman

Enliven your mind and become part of a creative movement-join Pen Parentis in building a vibrant new literary community Downtown. The Pen Parentis After-Work Reading Series holds its third monthly reading featuring outstanding and notable authors REBECCA BARRY and CARA HOFFMAN on March 10th, 2009 from 6-8pm.

Everyone is welcome to this exciting new upscale literary event. Admission is free. Full bar and Todd English menu is available.

Rebecca Barry is the author of the novel-in-stories, Later, at the Bar, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Barnes and Noble Discovery Pick. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Details, More, and the Best American Travel Writing. Her short fiction has been in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Ecotone, the Mid-American Review, and the Best New American Voices. She lives in upstate New York with her two boys and authors the blog "The Main Street Diaries." She is currently working on a novel.

Cara Hoffman is the author of Nike, a Novel and The Wedding and Other Stories. She has won a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a New York State Council on the Arts Grant, and a Saltonstall studio residency for her fiction.

She received neither a high school diploma nor an undergraduate degree yet was admitted to Goddard College's Masters of Fine Art in Writing program based on the merit of her published work. Hoffman has lectured in the creative writing and journalism departments of Cornell University, Hobart WilLiam Smith Colleges, and SUNY Cortland.

Sponsored by Pen Parentis in association with the Seaport, this distinctive downtown reading series is held in the warm and intimate upstairs library lounge-just renovated!-of Todd English's newest venue, the Libertine, at the corner of Gold Street and Platt Street. Enter through the lobby of the elegant Gildhall Hotel in the heart of the Financial District.

Downtown resident and author, M. M. De Voe, founder and Executive Director of Pen Parentis, is proud to announce she has won a 2009 Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant to help support this reading series, which she curates with uptown author and Artistic Director of Pen Parentis, Arlaina Tibensky. Pen Parentis provides resources to authors who are also parents.

For more information on the series or the organization, or to sign up for the mailing list, visit www.penparentis.org.

Photo of Pen Parentis Literary Salon at the Libertine Library at Gild Hall (photo credit: Katie Kovach)