Join Elwin Cotman, Ben Passmore, and Luka Miro for a night of comics, fiction, poetry, and music, and hear debut readings from their newest works. Elwin Cotman is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010), and of the upcoming collection Hard Times Blues. A powerful and dynamic storyteller, he has toured across the United States . He will be on-hand with the updated third edition of The Jack Daniels Sessions EP. The Hard Times Blues Tour 2012 is his first full-fledged tour through the southern U.S.Joining Cotman will be New Orleans-based cartoonist Ben Passmore, who will do readings and projections from his newest full-color release, DAYGLOAYHOLE: It’s All Over, as well as maybe some soulful banjoy music to sadden the soul. Poet Luka Miro will be sharing poetry from their most recent collection, Cane Break.

The Jack Daniels Sessions EP is a collection of fabulist stories, many based out of American folklore. It was nominated for two 2011 Carl Brandon Society Awards.

In The Jack Daniels Sessions EP, A Washington D.C. punk club gets a visit from very ancient--and dangerous--guests. The mythic and the mundane collide at a general store in the segregated South. A young boy becomes apprentice to the Angel of Death. The humorous mixes with the historical and the epic mixes with the deeply personal. Cotman combines the language of high fantasy, urban fantasy, black folklore, teen angst, punk rock and horror to create American fairy tales with landscapes all their own.

“Elwin Cotman is one of the most original new voices you will encounter,” says Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Swamplandia! “He is a synthecdsizer of the domestic and the fantastic, of soaring myth and the grittiest realities, of lewd dialect and high lyricism. His stories are profound engagements with suffering of every stripe--they will also make you hoot with laughter. I was amazed by the force of Mr. Cotman’s pinwheeling imagination."

About Elwin Cotman

Cotman is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Lousiana-Lafayette. He holds an MFA from Mills College , and is a former resident of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writers Cooperative in Pittsburgh , PA. Having a background in theater and spoken word, Cotman has developed his own unique voice among fantasy authors. He organizes his own tours and has read across the United States . His storytelling has been showcased at venues such as Bluestockings in New York City , Litquake in San Francisco , the Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, and the Low Lives International Performance Festival. In addition, he is a longtime educator and community activist.

About Ben Passmore

Passmore, otherwise known as "the one that doesn't call" at his mom's house, is a 29 year comic type. He sits around sipping coffee, tinkering on his banjo, jawing around about this opera he's gonna make with dogs after the insurrection, and drawing comics during the fugue state that all that junk renders. DAYGLOAYHOLE is a comic follows a naked man wandering around a post-apocalyptic world worrying about his life's failures, a rubber dog, and a krusty searching for junk food with his fists. There's also a bit of hamfisted socio-political satire too, I guess

About Luka Miro

Luka Miro is a writer and poet based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Their poetry and short fiction has appeared in Spindle, Blue Leviathan Quarterly, Mindfuck Magazine, Četvrto Položaj, and Decks Of Grass: A Writer's Bloc Anthology. They owe The New Orleans Public Library more money than they currently have. Their newest collection is entitled Cane Break and will be published in November 2012 by preat press.

Come out for a night of multimedia from three top-notch artists!