If Las Vegas has long been mythologized as a city of reinvention, Neon Lit captures the work-in-progress, giving writers a place to develop their voices before they’re fully formed.
“These are the writers that are working on their first books, on their debut novels,” says Taylor Wright, president of the Neon Lit reading series. “It’s kind of like getting a peek into the future of the Las Vegas literary community.”
Founded in 2009 by UNLV alumna Kathryn Kruse, Neon Lit began without a name, just as a loose gathering of Master of Fine Arts students reading their work to one another, as Wright describes it. By 2010, the series adopted its moniker, and over the past 16 years it’s expanded beyond the university corridors into a broader civic space, drawing audiences hungry for literary community.
That evolution is central to Wright’s stewardship. Alongside a committee of student volunteers, she curates lineups, books venues and shapes the series’ tone, which often embraces fun and inviting themes.
As an MFA student, Wright says these readings are integral to staying connected with her peers in the program.
Left to right: Uli Geissendoerfer, Julian Tanaka
“Originally they were just trying to provide a space for the writers in the program to get together and hear each other’s work because we don’t often work with people across the genre,” she says. “So, a lot of the community within the program didn’t even know what their cohort was writing or working on.”
On April 3, the series returns with a program themed around the beat poetry movement of the 1950s and its jazz counterpart. The upcoming reading, held at 11th Street Records and sponsored by Black Mountain Institute, features current MFA and PhD candidates JM Huck, Seth Kleinschmidt, Jordan Barnes and Hüseyin S. Arıkan, each presenting work that remains in progress. Fiction, nonfiction and poetry are drawn from the program that cycles through dozens of writers across a variety of genres.
The evening is framed by UNLV professor Jessica Teague, whose brief talk will examine the Beat Generation’s commitment to poetry as both performance and resistance.
That ethos also finds a contemporary corollary in the night’s musical accompaniment. Local jazz musicians Uli Geissendoerfer and Julian Tanaka will improvise on piano, saxophone and clarinet, with the occasional punctuation of bongos.
Closing the program is Bruce Isaacson, Clark County’s first poet laureate, whose featured set offers a more established counterpoint to the emerging voices that precede him.
Neon’s Lit’s overall objective is both simple and expansive: To create spaces where writers and listeners can encounter not just what local literature is, but what it is evolving into.
NEON LIT READING SERIES April 3, 6:30 p.m., free. 11th Street Records, instagram.com/neonlit_lv.
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