Babylon Salon
presents a special performance
Saturday, September 13, 2025
in The Sycamore's outdoor patio
2140 Mission St, San Francisco [16th St BART]
Come for drinks at 5 // Show starts at 5.30pm
featuring
Ann Cummins
[Yellowcake; Red Ant House]
[on Yellowcake] “A gorgeous novel about people who are tender and ornery and passionate and mixed up and real as the people we know in real life. I loved them, and I love this book." - Ann Packer
A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona writing programs, Ann Cummins is the author of Red Ant House, a San Francisco Chronicle best seller and Best Book of Book of the Year, and the novel Yellowcake. She has published stories in The New Yorker, McSweeneys, The Arkansas International and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and several Arizona Commission on the Arts fiction fellowships. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she’s an Emeritus Professor at Northern Arizona University.
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Tomas Moniz
[All Friends Are Necessary; Big Familia]
[on All Friends Are Necessary] “This splendid and rejuvenating novel will make you feel so full and alive, held and comforted." Joseph Han, author of Nuclear Family
Tomas Moniz is a latinx writer living in East Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway and the LAMBDA. His second novel, All Friends Are Necessary, won the 2024 California Golden Poppy Award. He’s thrilled to share that his next novel will be published Fall 26 from Algonquin Books. He teaches at Berkeley City College, the Antioch MFA program and USF.
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Peter Mountford
[Detonator; The Dismal Science]
[on Detonator] "Whatever sort of surprise you’re after—funny, devastating, sexy, shocking, savage, tender, illuminating — Detonator will supply it, in Mountford’s exquisitely tuned and attentive prose. Like Mary Gaitskill, Mountford has a gift for creating crystalline articulations of the messiness inside us. I loved these stories, and I learned from them." -- Karen Russell, author of The Antidote
A novelist, short story writer, and essayist, in recent years Peter Mountford has also become a popular writing coach and instructor. He is the author of the novels A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (2012 Washington State Book Award in fiction), and The Dismal Science (NYT editor’s choice). His next book, a collection of short stories called Detonator, has just been published by Four Way Books in 2025. Peter’s short fiction has appeared in Paris Review, Guernica, Missouri Review (twice), Ploughshares, Southern Review, Zyzzyva, Conjunctions, and Boston Review, where he won second place in the 2007 contest judged by George Saunders. His personal essays have appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times (Modern Love column), The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, Granta, and elsewhere. He’s also contributed feature articles to the Guardian, Writers’ Digest (three times), and elsewhere.
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M.M. Olivas
[Sundown in San Ojuela]
[on Sundown in San Ojuela] “This book is both luminous and so, so dark.”—Cynthia Gomez, author of The Nightmare Box and Other Stories.
M. M. Olivas is an alumna of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the Lambda Literary Workshop, and has an MFA in creative writing and English literature from San Jose State University. An Ignyte finalist, and featured on the Stoker’s longlist, Olivas’ fiction has appeared to critical acclaim in Uncanny, Apex, Weird Horror, and Bourbon Penn Magazine. As a trans, first-generation Chicana, she explores the intersection of queer and diasporic experiences in her fiction. Her debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela, portrays how Mexico’s indigenous and colonial pasts haunt the present. Olivas currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and in her free time, collects transforming robots.
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Maury Zeff
[Dada Teen Musical: the Play]
Maury Zeff’s work has been performed around the US and in Europe, and published in American Fiction, Southern California Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2021 Clark-Gross Novel Award, was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the Ink Slinger Playwriting Award, Acacia Fiction Prize, and Tobias Wolff Fiction Prize. Maury earned a creative writing MFA from the University of San Francisco, is a nationally rated Scrabble player, and won third place in the 2024 O. Henry World Championship Pun-off in Austin. His full-length play Dada Teen Musical: The Play will run from October 18 to November 16 at the Berkeley City Club.
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