Sundress Academy for the ARts Presents August Reading Series

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the August installment of our reading series. This event will take place on August 28, 2022 from 1-3PM at Pretentious Beer Co. 

Maurice Moore is currently a doctoral Performance Studies Candidate at the University of California-Davis. Moore’s works have appeared in Communication and Critical Cultural/Studies, Queer Quarterly Magazine, Decoded Pride, Confluence, and Mollyhouse. From 2011 to the present, the creative has exhibited at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) in London United Kingdom, Verge Center for the Arts in Sacramento California, Calabar Gallery in New York NY, Medford Arts Center in New Jersey, Christina Ray Gallery in Soho New York, Mnemosphere Project in Milan Italy, Pence Gallery in Davis California, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro North Carolina.

Juliana Roth was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts for her fiction and is a recent resident with SAFTA. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Your Magic, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. She writes the weekly newsletter Drawing Animals which features essays, interviews, and doodles celebrating our interconnection with animal life, and teaches writing at NYU.

Based in Ten Mile, TN, Ali Simpson performs comedy all over the country from bowling alleys where people did not know comedy was happening to breweries, to venues such as Blue Ridge Comedy Club, ImprovBoston, and Empire Comedy Club. She has performed at the Comedyfort festival (Boise, ID), LaughFest (Grand Rapids, MI), and the What a Joke nationwide fundraising event for the ACLU. She produces shows in Knoxville with Tiny Stage Comedy. Her favorite shows are at queer anarchist bookstores, or at community centers in the sticks where retirees one-up her on dirty material. She thinks this path has been a great use of her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature.

Zach Russell is a singer-songwriter from Caryville, Tennessee. Growing up in a small town tucked away in the Appalachian mountains, Zach learned to play music working through the Red Book Hymnal in the band at a Southern Baptist Church. The notes of the supernatural and yearning still weave their way through his first person tales of pain and loss.

Our community partner for August is Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi is one of Tennessee’s oldest and largest private, non-profit health care agencies. For over 75 years, PPTNM has remained committed to providing high-quality, affordable reproductive services and education throughout Tennessee, north Mississippi and part of Arkansas. Their mission is to improve health and well-being by providing high-quality, nonjudgmental sexual health care, honest and accurate sexuality education, and reproductive health and rights advocacy.

Donate to support the essential work they do here.