In one week, on August 30, a special coming together of the writing tribes (and those who love them, or at least dig them) will occur at Three Keys (at the Ace Hotel, 600 Carondelet Street, NOLA), as six best-selling and award-winning writers will present work at a benefit reading for Peauxdunque founding member Terri Sue Shrum. In May, Terri was diagnosed with inoperable stage-4 pancreatic cancer. Since then, Terri has begun chemotherapy treatments at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, and writers nationwide have come together to help with an active fund-raising campaign to help Terri with her out-of-pocket treatment-related expenses. From 7 to 9 p.m. on August 30, we’ll continue that, with tunes spun by DJ Sep (Giuseppe Catania) and an evening emcee’d by Nick Fox. Admission is free, and donations will be accepted at the door and throughout the evening; RSVP here.

The second of our featured writers is Maurice Carlos Ruffin. When I asked Maurice for a bio, this is what he wrote: “Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s work has appeared in AGNI, Kenyon Review, and Massachusetts Review. He is a recipient of the Iowa Review Fiction Award and the William Faulkner Award for Novel in Progress. Maurice loves him some Terri.” All of that is true, but there’s much more. Maurice most recently is back from a fellowship at VONA and a waitership at Bread Loaf, each of which he attested to being life-changing. His short stories and essays have been published widely and to more acclaim than I can say here. But his work right now, the novel-in-progress, is already getting a lot of attention in the literary demi-world, and will hopefully birth out into the real world of readers in the near future (you will not be disappointed once you read it; it is filled with beauty and challenge and conviction). So come out and listen to Maurice, along with Nick Mainieri, M.O. Walsh, Bill Loehfelm, Kelly Harris-DeBerry, and Gian Francisco Smith, next Tuesday night!

Maurice Carlos Ruffin