Bread and Roses features Portland author Liz Prato on her debut short story collection, BABY'S ON FIRE, and Sisterhood in the writing world. Special guest: Laura Stanfill, Founder and Publisher of Forest Avenue Press, a national press based in Portland, OR.
Liz Prato's debut short story collection, Baby's On Fire, really delivers, on every level. Her characters are real, and refreshingly stripped of ego. We meet them in the aftermath of personal catastrophe--humbled by life, humanized, wide-open and vulnerable. Liz Prato puts her characters in complicated relationships, interesting scenarios, and global settings that come alive. The dialogue is truly outstanding, and the pages drip with dark humor. Liz Prato's stories deliver throughout, and often profoundly at the close—the endings surprise and illuminate deep human truths. Her stories are everything we want a short story to be--they capture a glimpse of this shared human experience, and pass on some hard won wisdom to help us live a little better while we're here.--Leigh Anne Kranz
Liz Prato was born and raised in Denver, where the mountains are majestic, but everything else is brown and flat. In the Eighties, she sported a bleached blond faux-hawk and attended Lewis & Clark College. After college, she worked a series of McJobs, then worked as a nonprofit fundraiser, then became a massage therapist and moved to Portland, then got serious about studying the craft of writing.
Liz’s short stories and essays have appeared in over two-dozen literary journals and magazines. She was the Guest Prose Editor for the Summer 2013 issue of VoiceCatcher, and edited the fiction anthology, The Night, and the Rain, and the River (Forest Avenue Press, 2014). Her short story collection, Baby's On Fire, is forthcoming from Press 53 in May 2015.
Awards include the 2010 Minnetonka Review Editor’s Prize, 1st place in the 2005 Berkeley Fiction Review Sudden Fiction Contest, four Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Scholarship to the 2012 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She began teaching at the Attic Institute in in 2008, and has taught creative writing for several literary organizations throughout Oregon.
Liz lives with furry feline friends and her best friend/husband, who is a bookseller, musician, and writer. And, yes, she dreams of palm trees. Every day.http://www.lizprato.com/index.html
http://www.forestavenuepress.com/
http://www.press53.com/bio_Liz_Prato.html
Leigh Anne Kranz hosts.
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