Nonfiction for No Reason

Nonfiction for No Reason is a Seattle-based international literary event series. NFNR spotlights established writers next to writers who've never been published and encourages all readers to take risks they normally wouldn't.

May 27 at Unicorn Bar in Kingston will be no exception. Founder Katie Lee Ellison is joined by the brilliant and Newburgh local, Jessica Lynne, to co-host for the second time in New York, after an incredible night in the East Village in 2024.

This evening, both Jessica and Katie will read alongside:
- May Teng
- Chet'la Sebree
- Lydi Conklin
- Melisse Gelula
- Tarisai Ngangura

Tickets are sliding scale, $5–$25, and no one will be turned away for lack of funds. All proceeds go to the artists and venue, so please show your support!

The talent on this line up is outrageous. We can't wait to see you there!

May Teng is an Indonesian-American writer based in Brooklyn. May’s fixations include fragmented narratives, portraits of place, boundaries and borders, and collective memory. Her writing has received support and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Civil Society Institute, Periplus, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. May attended the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program, where she taught creative writing and learned to use the word “lacuna” in a sentence.

Tarisai Ngangura is a journalist, music critic, and photographer. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she finished her post-secondary education in Canada. She has been based in several countries, reporting from Brazil, Canada, and the US. Some of her essays, interviews, and photography have appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, Gusher Magazine, Mother Tongue, Oxford American, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. Her debut novel, The Ones We Loved, was published in the spring of 2025 and is currently making its way through the world as her greatest privilege and most intimate creation. This also, now makes her a novelist. If you have really great writing questions or pressing film recs to share, you can find her on Tumblr at writing-drinkingtea.tumblr.com.

Melisse Gelula is the founder of Memoiring, a book club and writing community that hosts notable authors each month for live Q+As, and the co-founder of award-winning media company Well+Good (successfully acquired in 2018). Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, Good Morning America, Electric Literature, and Grand Journal. Melisse has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is an advisor to the Deep Water Literary Festival. She was recently awarded a NYSCA/Arts For Sullivan Literary Grant for her memoir in progress about being raised by a child psychologist who begins to hear voices. She's going to try to read something that's not completely devastating...

An essayist and poet from the Mid-Atlantic, Chet'la Sebree is the author of the debut essay collection Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home as well as the poetry collections Blue Opening (longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry), Field Study (winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets), and Mistress (nominated for an NAACP Image Award). She’s an assistant professor at George Washington University and serves as a faculty mentor in Randolph College’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

Lydi Conklin is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. They’ve received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, Millay, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, American Short Fiction, VQR, and elsewhere. They have drawn graphic fiction for Lenny Letter, Drunken Boat, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Jessica Lynne is a writer, editor, and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS. BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in Artforum, The Believer, Frieze, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Oxford American. Jessica is a recipient of a 2025 Rabkin Prize, which celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of visual arts writers, and hosted the limited-series podcast Harlem is Everywhere.

Katie Lee Ellison is the founder, curator, and host of the Seattle-based international literary event series @nonfictionfornoreason. You can find her monthly column of author interviews and book reviews in The Stranger, and essays in Shenandoah, The Seventh Wave, J Journal, and elsewhere. She’s a contributing editor at Moss, and her memoir-in-progress has been supported by Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a Hugo House fellowship, and Tin House Summer Workshop. Find her at katieleeellison.com or read musings and about the next NFNR in her newsletter, A Beautiful Fad (https://katieleeellison.substack.com/).