Watershed Reading Series

It’s fiction for this edition of ALL's ongoing Watershed Reading Series, from a diverse crew. Visiting from Chicago is Alex Jennings, whose novel Dead End Boys will be published in 2027. Also hopping up to Mad City from ChiTown is LP Kindred, who writes speculative fiction and is working on a novella. And Milwaukeean Ben Pladek’s debut novel DRY LAND was published in 2023. Expect the unexpected.

media release: Join us on Saturday, May 23 at 7:00 PM for a special reading with local fiction authors Alex Jennings, LP Kindred, and B. Pladek.

Alex Jennings has been publishing SF for over twenty years. He teaches at the Stonecoast MFA program and is a student at Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA program. His novel, Dead End Boys will be published in 2027.

LP Kindred is an Ignyte-nominated Chicagoan-Angeleno writer, editor, teaching artist, and podcaster of speculative fiction from the axes of his Black and Queer Identities. An alum of Hurston-Wright, VONA, and Clarion Foundation workshops, Kindred's words appear in Apex Magazine, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Escape Pod, PodCastle, Anathema Spec from the Margins, Speculative City, LeVar Burton Reads, and Carnegie Hall's 2022 Afrofuturism Festival, among other. LP's a BFA Candidate in Writing at School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he's at work on a long-form novella project.

Ben Pladek is a writer and literature professor based in Milwaukee. He's published short fiction in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Slate Future Tense, Fantasy, and elsewhere. His debut novel DRY LAND appeared in 2023, and his fiction has been shortlisted for the Ignyte and Crawford award.