MAY 27 • 8PM

THE URBANE ARTS CLUB

Leslie-Ann Murray is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago, and a citizen of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She created Brown Girl Book Lover, a social media platform where she interviews diverse writers and reviews books that should be at the forefront of our imagination. Leslie-Ann is working on her first nonfiction essay collection, This Has Made Us Beautiful, about incarceration, race, immigration, education, and the overwhelming impact of these political forces on herself, the boys and men in her life, and the women in her community. She has been published in Poets & Writers, Zone 3, Ploughshares, Blackbird Journal, The Rumpus, The Audacity, and Salamander Literary Magazine. 

Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collections Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012) and Paperweight (University of Akron Press, 2026), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review, and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Glenside, Pennsylvania, with his wife and daughter. 

Hannah Thurman is a Brooklyn-based writer originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. Her debut novel, Mercy Hill, was released by Doubleday on May 5, 2026. Her second novel, Thin Skin, will be published by Doubleday in 2028. In 2024 she was named a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction. The winner of The Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Fiction, her stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, where she works in an advertising agency as an engagement strategist. 

Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the notorious “Preppy Murder” of 1986. The novel was named a Best Book of 2025 by the New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, and Oprah Daily. Weiner is the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City, and now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. 

Doors open at 7:30, show starts at 8. RSVP here.