Peer Pressure : Indie Presses Unite! This Saturday

The third-calendar-month-awesomeness of March can be celebrated in a variety of ways: NCAA brackets, SXSW and Truck Month will do for some, but others may need more convincing. Thanks to Peer Pressure: Indie Presses Unite, the unenthusiastic can find something to celebrate as March is also Small Press Month! This Saturday, March 27th at Club Deville, American Short Fiction will host a lively celebration of Austin's finest small presses featuring readings from Monofonus Press, Black Buzzard Press, Dalton Publishing and Effing Press. Come hear fiction, poetry, music and banter with the wordiest kids you know.

Each of Saturday night's featured presses are an outstanding example of the strength and diversity of Austin's literary scene. American Short Fiction is a nationally-distributed quarterly magazine that features a top-shelf mixture of emerging and established writers. For the evenings' event, actress Kelli Bland will be reading a piece by Marie-Helene Bertino from their newest issue. Accustomed collaborators Monofonus Press, host to the monthly Teleportal Readings series, will transmit a reading by National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon. Original poetry will be read by publisher and founder Bradley Strahan of Black Buzzard Press, which has published a blend of books, chapbooks, and anthologies for the past three decades. Their poetry and art journal, Visions-International, regularly prints translated work from an impressive range of languages. Also sharing poetry will be Michael Gilmore for Dalton Publishing, an independent Austin press who has published solid works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction for the past seven years. Cindy St. John will read for Effing Press, a superb labor of poetry love that crafts their books completely in house using their own equipment and techniques.

Music will be provided by the Whiskey Priest Seth Woods and the master of ceremony will be author and emcee extrodinaire Owen Egerton.