If you’ll be at AWP in DC, or even if you don’t know what that is but you’re within a two-week headlong sprint of Dupont Circle, then you should join the Monster Mags of the Midwest—Ninth Letter, Mid-American Review, and Cincinnati Review—for a fearsome night of reading, Heartland-style, with plenty of poetry, fiction, and beer on tap. Lots of bread, too, for some reason.

This is all happening on Saturday, February 5, at 7 p.m. in the Bread & Brew bar, which is on Dupont Circle, one quick metro stop from the AWP conference site:  Bread & Brew, 1247 20th St., Washington, DC, 20036  (phone 202-466-2676).

Through your brew goggles (bread goggles?) you’ll see all of these Monster Mag writers get behind the mic:

Lucy Corin is the author of the short-story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2). Stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Tin House, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and a lot of other places. She’s been a fellow at Breadloaf and Sewanee, and a resident at Yaddo and the Radar Lab. Lucy holds a BA from Duke University and an MFA from Brown. She’s an Associate Professor at University of California–Davis, where she teaches in the English Department and Creative Writing Program.

Fun fact: “She’s currently working on a book of a hundred very small apocalypses and a novel about the brain” [from her blog].

Bob Hicok’s most recent book is Words for Empty and Words for Full (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim, and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in five volumes of Best American Poetry. Hicok is currently an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Fun fact [from the Poetry Foundation’s website]: Before he began his teaching career, Hicok has worked as an automotive dye designer and a computer system administrator.

Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinksy for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, was published by Sarabande in 2007. A recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Whiting Award, she is co-editor with poet Michael Dumanis of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). Cate teaches poetry writing in Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program and is an Associate Professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Fun facts [from an interview with the magazine Redivider]: “I worked extensively with animals when I was in my teens: for a brief time at a pet store and then a couple of summers at an animal shelter. When young I was alternately obsessed with insects, horses, tropical fish, and, much later, parrots.”

“My day does not truly begin until I’ve acquired and consumed a 32-ounce Big Gulp of Diet Coke from 7-Eleven. It’s the Big Gulp that’s important, not 7-Eleven, where I find the employees rather disagreeable.”

Erika Meitner is the author of Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her third book, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, is due out from Anhinga Press in February 2011. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared most recently in APR, Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, The New Republic, and on Slate.com. She has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program, and is also completing her doctorate in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

Fun fact [from her website]: “In addition to teaching creative writing at UVA, UW–Madison, and UC–Santa Cruz, she has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle-school teacher in the New York City public school system.”

Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has appeared in four volumes of the New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best anthology. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee (with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son, Griff), where he teaches fiction at the University of the South and helps run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Fun facts [from his blog]: “In high school . . . I was obsessed with how to comb my hair and I liked looking at men wearing suits, which seemed like the strangest attire in the world at the time.”

“ I can clearly remember wanting to marry Suzanne Vega.”