Desert Writers' Showcase at Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque presents, "No Place for a Puritan Anthology Reading," a set of readings from No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts with Jeanette Clough, Gayle Brandeis, Ruth Nolan, Deanne Stillman and Rebecca K. O'Connor.

JEANETTE CLOUGH's books include Island, Cantatas, and Celestial Burn. She works at the Getty Research Institute.

GAYLE BRANDEIS is the author of the novels Delta Girls, Self Storage and The Book of Dead Birds, which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change. She's also the author of the young adult novel My Life with the Lincolns and a creativity guide, Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write.

RUTH NOLAN is the author of two collections of poetry, Wild Wash Road and Dry Waterfall and is a contributor to Inlandia: a literary journey through Southern California's Inland Empire. She edits Phantom Seed, a literary magazine of desert writing and teaches at College of the Desert.

REBECCA K. O'CONNOR is the author of the award-winning memoir Lift. She has published essays in South Dakota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and West. Her novel, Falcon's Return, was a Holt Medallion Finalist for best first novel.

DEANNE STILLMAN is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her latest book, Mustang: the Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, was named Los Angeles Times' "Best Book, 2008," and her previous book, Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave, the Times' "Best Book, 2001," was called "a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer," by Hunter S. Thompson.