The newest reading series from Bull City Press brings you poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from established and emerging writers for free on the fourth Saturday each month.

This month featuring:

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama.  Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (Red Hen), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She has taught with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, Swarthmore College, and in workshops across the U.S. In January 2021, Ahmed joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.

Junious ‘Jay’ Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), and the author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press, 2020) and Composition ( Button Poetry, 2022). Jay currently serves as a Program Director for BreatheInk, where he facilitates writing and performance workshops and coaches youth poets attending Brave New Voices each year. He serves as vice-chair for the board of The Watering Hole, a non-profit organization that aims to nurture writers of color in the Southern tradition. He also serves on several curatorial committees related to the arts in Charlotte. His work can be found in Crabfat Magazine, Lackadaisy Lit Mag, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and on Button Poetry. 

Scott Gould was born, raised and still lives in South Carolina. His first book, Strangers to Temptation—a linked story collection the Atlanta Journal Constitution called “a compulsive read” and Foreword Reviews dubbed “funny, often poignant, and not easily forgotten”—was published by Hub City Press in 2017. Of his debut novel, Whereabouts (Koehler Books), the Atlanta Journal Constitution said, the book is “distinctly Southern but gritty, without a whiff of moonlight and magnolias.” Gould’s memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly (Vine Leaves Press), was released in March of 2021, and a new novel, The Hammerhead Chronicles, will be published by the University of North Georgia Press in early 2022. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Kenyon Review, New Stories from the South, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse and The Bitter Southerner, among others. He is a two-time winner of the S.C. Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose and the S.C. Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina with a cat and a dog, and teaches creative writing at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities. He is always pulling for the Braves.