This month's Grotto Night features Bay Area writers Sezin Devi Koehler, Rowena Singer and Beth Winegarner talking about campfire stories and other ghostly narratives.
Sezin Devi Koehler is a multiracial Sri Lankan/Lithuanian American and author of Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory (April 2025, Chicago Review Press), a sociocultural deep dive into Keanu Reeves' entire creative catalog. Pop-culture writer, entertainment journalist and Rotten Tomatoes-certified film and TV critic for Black Girl Nerds, her bylines also include Entertainment Weekly, The Daily Beast, Scalawag Magazine, Tasteful Rude, Certified Forgotten, Teen Vogue, and many more. Sezin writes from an East Oakland historic landmark that looks uncannily like the house from Practical Magic, where she can see the San Francisco Bay from her own window.
Rowena Leong Singer is a Chinese-Filipino writer whose work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, North American Review, Black Warrior Review, Narrative, CRAFT and elsewhere. She is the grand prize winner in literary fiction for the Book Pipeline Unpublished Contest and a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship Contest. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she was awarded the Barry Hannah Merit Scholarship in Fiction. She is an associate editor at CRAFT, a co-director of Rooted & Written and a member of The Writers Grotto. Find her on Instagram at @rowenaleongsinger.
Beth Winegarner is an award-winning journalist, author, essayist and pop culture critic who’s contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Wired, Mother Jones and many others. She is the author of several books, most recently San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History.
The Writers Grotto is a community of working writers and narrative artists who connect in physical and virtual space, pooling our talents to support each other, mentor and teach others and engage the wider world. The Grotto fosters a literary culture that is generous in spirit and deeply inclusive, elevating writers of all backgrounds.
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