Volume is a FREE reading & music series featuring prose, poetry and a short DJ set. Every second Saturday at 7:00 pm at The Spotty Dog. Books are available for purchase and signing. This month's writers include: NINA BOUTSIKARIS is the author of I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych. Her nonfiction has appeared in Los Angeles Review, Hobart, and the Best American Essays Notable List in 2016. Her essay “Surrender” is forthcoming in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction. She made the leap from Brooklyn to Hudson last year. STACY WAKEFIELD Stacy’s Sunshine Crust Baking Factory makes vivid use of her firsthand experience in New York's 1990s squatting scene. Her earlier nonfiction book on squatters, Not For Rent, is an underground classic. She is co-creator, along with Nick Zinner and Zachary Lipez, of 131 Different Things and Please Take Me Off the Guest List. She lives in the Catskills and Brooklyn. DOMENICA RUTA is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, With or Without You. Her first novel, Last Day, published in May, was called “darkly glittering” by Theres Svoboda in the New York Times. She co-edited We Got This, an anthology of essays and poetry by solo mothers, forthcoming in September. She advocates for solo moms on ESME.com. COURTNEY MAUM is the author of the novels Costalegre, Touch, and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, and the chapbook Notes From Mexico. Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book, is forthcoming from Catapult. She lives in Connecticut where she founded The Cabins, a creative retreat. A DJ from Stacy Wakefield will follow the reading.

The Writers Studio Reading Series is a quarterly event at The Spotty Dog, where its instructors and students read from their work. The Writers Studio Hudson Valley welcomes students at all stages, from those who have only dreamed of writing fiction or poetry to those with MFAs hungry for additional serious, ongoing instruction. July's event includes: Sylvie Bertrand is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her stories and poems have appeared in Peregrine Journal, Epiphany, Cleaver Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Alexandria Quarterly, and December magazine, among others. She received a Pushcart Special Mention in 2018 for her fiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. She teaches at The Writers Studio in NYC and is the co-founding editor of Cagibi, a literary journal @cagibilit.com Rachael Nevins is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer whose poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Rattle, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Literary Mama, Hazlitt, Publishers Weekly, the Ploughshares Blog, and elsewhere. She teaches Online Advanced Poetry for The Writers Studio. Amy Lyons is a 2019 resident at Millay Colony for the Arts and earned a 2019 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and was nominated for a 2015 Kirkwood Literary Prize in fiction from UCLA Extension.Deidre Jaye Byrne is a student at the Writers Studio Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in The Avalon Literary Review, Forth Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Literally Stories (UK); a new story will be appearing in the Summer 2019 volume of Ginosko Literary Journal. Thomas Pletcher has published poetry in the US and the UK. He maintains a blog at writeside.com. Elizabeth Sacre grew up in Australia but has lived in the U.S. for much of her adult life. She lives between New York City, where she practices as a psychoanalyst, and the Hudson Valley, where she writes poetry and fiction.

Lily Konigsberg is a member of the experimental punk band Palberta and Matt Norman performs as Horn Horse, and together they formed a group called Lily And Horn Horse. The duo will release a collaborative album next month, on the heels of Palberta’s most recent album Bye Bye Berta, by way of Philly’s Ramp Local Records. Lily On Horn Horse is 28-tracks long, and due to its interpretive nature, we’re premiering three of the album’s songs at once so listeners can get a feel for the project. Konigsberg and Norman are both multi-instrumentalists, and their versatility can be heard on “George Jones’ Greatest Hits,” “Dancing In The Tubes,” and my favorite of the trio: “Today.” All three of these tracks recall some of Arthur Russell’s deconstructed pop demos, and on “Today,” Konigsberg and Norman piece together the scaffolding for a pop song that has the melodic potential to be developed into something much, much bigger -Stereogum