Fox City Lit @ AWP!
Hark, all ye AWP-goers and East-Coasters and Baltimoreans!
After the conference panels have drained your attention and the bookfair has drained your pocketbook, make haste to the Strange Harbor reading, hosted by Fox City Lit and Night Ginkgo Press.
Join us at 5pm on March 5th at Mystique Barrel Brewing for an off-site reading of the highest order!
Shake off the cold and join us for an afternoon of local creative writers sharing stories, poems, and conversation—just when we need them most.
If your New Year’s resolutions include connecting with the community and feeding your creative drives, come listen, linger, and be reminded that even in the depths of winter, something new is always beginning.
Mackenzies Tunes & Tonics is in the Old Town Plaza, which boasts hundreds of free parking spaces.
Fall 2025 Reading
Still thirsty for more great readings after the Fall for the Book festival? Come join Fox City Lit as we present readers from around the region, including Greg Marak, Candice Wiswell, Mason MFA student Michaela Godding, GMU’s own Sally Keith, and Shelagh Powers Johnson, whose debut story collection just came out in August.
Summer 2025 Reading
Fox City Lit is ready to drop some creative flow on Fairfax City this July! Take a break from the summer heat and enjoy mint-condition poetry and prose, performed by the authors themselves. We’re talking the cherriest of creative content from a gang of local authors straight outta the DMV.
Be there or be quadrilateral!
[Yes, a polygon joke. We will not apologize.]
Spring 2025 Reading
It’s that time again! If you’re feeling energized by May Day, and if you didn’t already invest in a fancy hat for the Kentucky Derby, why not join Fox City Lit for an afternoon of prose and poetry by some talented local authors of the DMV? Hope you can make it!
Writing Group Meet-Ups
On Wednesdays, we meet at Commonwealth Brewing Company in Downtown Fairfax from 6:00-8:00pm to write. To work on writing. To produce new writing. To explore ideas. To put words on the page. To talk craft. To talk about writing and good books and the anxiety of feeling guilty for sitting around not-writing when you know you should be writing. We call this a “generative” workshop because we hope you can generate some pages and manifest your inner self in the concrete world.
We devote the last Wednesday meet-up of each month to submitting work. We share what we know about calls for submissions, contests, lit mags, and small presses. We sign in to Submittable accounts (or wherever), upload files, and hit “Submit.” But mostly, we encourage each other.
Winter 2025 Reading
Our winter reading was 2 February 2025. To some, this is Groundhog Day. To others, James Joyce’s birthday. To those who adorn their mantles with Bill Murray saint candles, this is a high holy day.
Many thanks to all who braved the NoVa icy snow-sleet-blizzard-pocalypse to join us for a smattering of poetry and prose from some immensely talented local writers!
Fall 2024 Reading
As harvest season creaked to its end, we gathered a cornucopia of fine writing–the kind of language you want to stockpile to get you through a shit winter.
We were stoked to hear work from Mason profs and MFA-ers, as well as work from Nick Gardner, D.C.’s very own, distinguished rising star of an author, hot off the book release tour for his new collection, Delinquents. Carol Mitchell graced us with adventurous works-in-progress (the kind of experimentation we love round these parts). Liz Paul taught us all a new appreciation for ekphrasis, while the young Turks from Mason shone a light on poetry’s present and future.
Summer 2024 Reading
We launched our reading series with some exciting writers from the DMV who shared their fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Billy Howell recounted the near-disaster of a Nordic vacation gone awry. Hannah Grieco was fresh off her duty leading a craft workshop at the Barrelhouse conference, and Andrew Bertaina read from his new collection of personal essays, (despite how kickass his fiction is). Even though Martin Mitchell didn’t bring his guitar, his poems brought the music.
This event blew our expectations out of the water! Many thanks to Tony at Old Firestation #3 for a strange and 100% appropriate venue in historic Old Town Fairfax.
Fox City Lit 