To celebrate the paperback launch of his book “The Riots I have Known”, Ryan Chapman is hosting a digital variety show with Rough Draft Bar & Books on December 9th, 2020 at 8pm ET.

Instead of a reading, let’s have a zoom party.  A loose version of “The Tonight Show,” with booze tips for lockdown, ribald stories, writing advice, cooking segments, psychedelics, and a few surprises. We’ll even have a house band. Spread the word! We’ll bend zoom until it breaks.

Guests include: Rebecca Makkai, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Geoff Dyer, Kristen Arnett, Maris Kreizman, Josh Gondelman, and Rob Doyle, with music from Sari Botton and Bran Macaluso.

If you want to buy a book, please use Ryan’s local indie Rough Draft. You can get a signed and personalized copy of Riots through this link.

DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW was the 2019 winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize for In West Mills. He holds an MFA and BFA in creative writing, and an MA in English literature. De’Shawn has received scholarships from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in the New York City area.

GEOFF DYER is the award-winning author of many books, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, Zona (on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker), and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

REBECCA MAKKAI is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

KRISTEN ARNETT is the NYT bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was listed as one of The New York Times top books of 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter‘s Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. She was a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and currently lives in Miami, Florida.

MARIS KREIZMAN is the host of The Maris Review, a literary podcast from Literary Hub. She’s the creator of Slaughterhouse 90210, a blog and book (Flatiron Books, 2015). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, The Ringer, The Toast, The Hairpin, The Cut, Vulture, Glamour, Esquire, GQ, OUT Magazine, and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her dog, and her books.

JOSH GONDELMAN is a comedian and writer who has earned two Peabody Awards, three Emmys, and two WGA Awards for his work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. He is currently a writer/producer for Desus & Mero on Showtime. In the past, Josh has written for Billy on the Street. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, and the New Yorker. He lives in New York City with his wife and pug.

ROB DOYLE is the author of Threshold, published by Bloomsbury USA in March. His debut novel, Here Are the Young Men, was selected as one of Hot Press magazine’s “20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016,” and has been made into a film starring Dean Charles Chapman and Anya Taylor Joy. This Is the Ritual, a collection of short stories, was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim. He has written for the Guardian, TLS, Vice, Sunday Times, Dublin Review, Observer and many other publications, and throughout 2019 he wrote a weekly column on cult books for the Irish Times. He lives between Ireland and Berlin.

SARI BOTTON is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. She edited the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY and its New York Times bestselling follow-up, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY and for five years served as Essays Editor at Longreads. She teaches creative nonfiction courses at Catapult and in the MFA program at Bay Path University.