The Sleeping Giant Reading Series brings writers and book lovers together on the third Thursday of the month. In the long shadow of Hamden’s Sleeping Giant, writers of every kind gather to hear professional readings, raise a glass, network, and support one another’s work. All are welcome, whether you’re a scribbler who hasn’t yet dared to call yourself a “writer” or an experienced published author.

For September’s Installment, we have writers Sheila Dietz and Nalini Jones.

Sheila Dietz’s The Berry and the Bee won the 2023 Gerald Cable First Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. David Wojahn has said that her poems offer “a glimpse of divinity at one moment, and a reckoning with dread in the next.” Sheila grew up in the Netherlands, attended a Dutch school and began conceiving of the world in literary terms at an early age. She has been a Bread Loaf Scholar and won an Individual Artist Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Sheila was a librarian at the New Haven Free Public Library for many years. She’s the co-founder of New Haven’s Salt and Pepper Gospel singers.

The Kirkus review of Nalini Jones’s new novel, The Unbroken Coast, notes that she “writes with extraordinary empathy for her characters.  . . .peppering her prose with sharply observed aphorisms: ‘This was what the world did: press in on you with its bad-news this and so-sad that, snatch away what little time you had to see to your own affairs, fill your head with pictures you wished you’d never seen.’” She’s also published a story collection, What You Call Winter, and nonfiction about politics, jazz, folk music, travel, etc. She’s won O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, and an NEA fellowship. Nalini teaches at Fairfield University.