Fall Catamaran Launch Party

Catamaran Literary Reader, founded in 2012, is located in the Tannery Art Center in Santa Cruz. This beautiful, high quality, full-color quarterly magazine features fine art, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. The contributing artists and writers come from California and beyond. It has a loyal following of readers who celebrate culture, arts, books, and museums. Catamaran also features a poetry prize for West Coast poets and an annual Catamaran Writing Conference during the summer. Visit the website at www.catamaranliteraryreader.com.

Mechanics' Institute is delighted to collaborate with Catamaran to celebrate their Fall 2024 edition. Featured writers include Joseph Francia, Jason Friedman, Tobey Hiller, Charles Hood, Robert Hutchinson, Kathryn Jordan, Joe Johnson, and Addie Mahmassani, who will read from their works.

Join us for a reception at 6:00 pm, with readings beginning at 6:30 pm until 7:30 pm.

Magazines will be sold onsite.

Meet the Authors

Born and raised in California, Joseph AJ Francia now lives in Queens, New York, where he’s seemingly sampled all of the Szechuan restaurants within a five-mile radius of his apartment. When he’s not thinking about his next meal, he spends most of his free time writing fiction for an in-progress short story collection. He has had his work published in Eclectica.

Jason K. Friedman is the author of Liberty Street and the story collection Fire Year, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award, as well as the children’s books Phantom Trucker and Haunted Houses. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Moment, Tablet, Gettysburg Review, Image, South Carolina Review, Mission at Tenth, Jonathan, Fjords Review, Decadent Review, and Cimarron Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Gay Fiction, The Queer South, and the cultural studies reader Goth. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.

Tobey Hiller writes poetry, flash, and fiction. She’s the author of four books of poetry, a novel, and a collection of stories. Her poems and stories have appeared widely in journals, such as Ambush Review, Audience Askew, Canary, CRAFT, The Fabulist, Shot Glass Journal, Here Comes Everyone, Five Fingers Review, Mediterranean Poetry, Milkweed Chronicle, Poetry Flash, Sisyphus, Sin Fronteras/Writers without Borders, Spillway, and Unlikely Stories Mark V, and in six anthologies. Her current poetry collection in ms. before anything is dust was named a finalist in Catamaran’s 2024 Poetry Book Prize.

Charles Hood is a frequent contributor to Catamaran Literary Reader. His new book, Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds: A Sideways Look at the Pacific Ocean and Everything In It, will be released soon by Heyday Books.

Robert Hutchinson is a writer and surfer. He lives in Woodside, California, with his wife, two children, and three chickens. His debut publication is in the Fall 2024 edition of Catamaran.

Kathryn Jordan holds an English M.A. from UC Berkeley. Her poems have won first place in the San Miguel de Allende Poetry Prize and placed in the Connecticut Poetry and Sydney Lanier Awards. Also, her work has won Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, Connecticut Poetry Award, and Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize on multiple occasions. Her poems can be found in Catamaran, The Sun Magazine, Atlanta Review, and New Ohio Review, among others.

Joe Johnson writes fiction and poetry, and his stories have appeared in Fiction Southeast, the Santa Clara Review, and the Pacifica Literary Review. He won Peatsmoke Journal’s 2022 fiction contest and Carve Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award. His training includes an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University and an MA in English Literature at Central Washington University, where he formerly taught English. Five years ago, Joe moved to Portland, Oregon, and began reading at open mics and joining workshops, including Chuck Palahniuk’s Hindsight nights. His recent stories are shaped by the city, teeming with urban wildlife, absurdism, and “Dangerous Writing” minimalism. He currently works as an operations manager at a law firm in downtown Portland, a source of endless stories.

Addie Mahmassani is a poet, musician, and cultural historian originally from the Washington, DC, area and now based in Santa Cruz, California. She served as the poetry editor for Reed Magazine, Issue 156. She holds a PhD in American studies from Rutgers University–Newark, where she specialized in performance studies, with emphasis on gender and sexuality in the 1960s. She is also a journalist covering arts and entertainment for Metro Silicon Valley, Good Times, Growing Up in Santa Cruz, and other Bay Area papers.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Mechanics' Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco, United States