Storytellers Open Mic at Distillery 98

For our next Open Mic Night, we're back at the mothership: Distillery 98. You know the drill. Join us Thursday, May 11th, and listen along to brave local storytellers as they share their written and spoken tales. As always, doors will open at 5 and stories will begin at 6 PM sharp. In anticipation of Longleaf Writers Conference, which kicks off its 10th year in Seaside May 13th-20th, we are so excited to welcome conference directors and acclaimed writers Seth Brady Tucker and Matt Bondurant as our Featured Storytellers for the evening. 

As for this month’s theme, we’re going back to our roots: what grounds us, shapes us, and lets us grow beyond the places we once knew.

Longleaf gets its name from the longleaf pine, a tree with a shallow but wide root system that allows it to grow tall. “These trees are responsible for the unique environment of lake and dunes abundant in South Walton county and throughout the South,” says Tucker and Bondurant. “We like the fact that without the wide and thirsty root system, there would be no gulf-side beaches or dunes here on the Emerald Coast. We feel that the wide roots of literature and creativity do the same for our humanity and for our communities and represents our literary devotion to this community and to the South as a whole.”

For those interested in taking the mic, we ask that you please email emeraldcoaststorytellers@gmail.com to be considered for a reading spot and include your name, genre, a little bit about yourself, and what you plan to present. We've had a lot of requests and would like to give everyone a chance to share their stories! If there's time for extra people, we'll open the floor before our Featured Storytellers. 

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About our Featured Storytellers: 

Seth Brady Tucker’s second book We Deserve the Gods We Ask For won the Gival Press Poetry Award and went on to win the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His first book Mormon Boy won the 2011 Elixir Press Editor’s Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. He has won a number of individual writing awards including the Shenandoah Bevel Summers Fiction Prize and the Literal Latte Short Fiction Award, among others. His recent work appears in such magazines and journals as Copper Nickel, Los Angeles Review, Driftwood, Iowa Review, December, Pleiades, Shenandoah, PoetryNorthwest, Chattahoochee Review, and many others. In 2013, alongside the novelist Matt Bondurant and educator Jonathan D'Avignon, he founded (and is currently executive director of) the Longleaf Writers Conference, which takes place every May in Seaside, Florida. Seth has served as the Carol Houck Smith Scholar at Bread Loaf, and the Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee, and has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, Northern Arizona University, and top-ranked Florida State University (PhD, 2012). Currently, Seth is writing a novel, and his first short fiction collection was recently a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award. Both are represented by Alex Glass at Glass Literary Management, New York. Seth teaches poetry and fiction workshops at the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver as well as the Colorado School of Mines near Denver where he is an associate teaching professor. He is originally from Wyoming, and once served as an Army 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in Iraq.

Matt Bondurant’s latest novel Oleander City hit book stores nationwide last June.  His previous novels include The Night Swimmer, which was featured in the New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, and The Daily Beast, among others.  His second novel The Wettest County in the World is an international bestseller, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, a San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year, and was made into a feature film (Lawless) by Director John Hillcoat, starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce.  His first novel The Third Translation is an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide.  He has published short stories in such journals as Glimmer Train, The New England Review, and Prairie Schooner, and his latest short story appears in the Dallas Noir anthology published in 2015. Matt has published poems in The Notre Dame Review and Ninth Letter, among others, and his poetry is featured in Imaginative Writing, the most widely adopted creative writing text in the world. He has sold three original screenplays including a development deal with HBO/Cinemax to write and executive produce an original one-hour dramatic series, as well as a dramatic series for Warner Brothers Television. A former John Gardner Fellow in Fiction at Bread Loaf, Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State, and Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee, Matt has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.  He has appeared on various media outlets including NPR, Radio France, The Discovery Channel, and MSNBC.  In the past Matt worked for the Associated Press National Broadcast Office in Washington DC, as an on-air announcer and producer at a local NPR station in Virginia, and as a Steward at the British Museum in London, England.  He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi where he serves as the Director of the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi.