Coming this Wednesday, Oct. 29, in New York, Longreads and WordPress.com present a special night of storytelling at Housing Works with Oklahoma’s This Land Press. The event will be hosted by This Land editor Michael Mason, with Longreads founder Mark Armstrong. (You can also RSVP on Facebook.)

To get you ready for the big night, we’re thrilled to share a reading list of stories and books from the event’s featured storytellers.

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Rilla Askew

Askew is an Oklahoma-born writer and author of the novel Fire in Beulah, set against the backdrop of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

“Near McAlester” (This Land Press, August 2014)

On the complicated history of the place closest to her heart.

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Marcos Barbery

Barbery is a journalist and documentarian. His This Land article “From One Fire” tells the story of an unlikely civil rights leader in the Cherokee Nation.

“John School” (This Land Press, October 2014)

Can classroom education change the relationship between Johns and prostitutes?

“Bates intends to focus his school on educating Johns about their direct impact on the broader problem. He aims to heighten the Johns’ sense of personal responsibility and empathy for the women, or girls, they solicit.”

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Kiera Feldman

Feldman is a Brooklyn-based reporter whose story “Grace in Broken Arrow” earned Longreads’ Best Non-Fiction article of the year in 2012. She’s written for n+1, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and a number of other publications.

“Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Family Dynasty” (This Land Press, 2014)

How Richard Roberts went from heir to his father’s televangelism empire to ostracized from the kingdom.

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Mark Singer

Singer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1974. Singer’s account of the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City appeared in The New Yorker in 1985 and was published as a book, Funny Money.

“Secrets of the Magus” (The New Yorker, 1993)

A profile of Ricky Jay, “perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive.”

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Ginger Strand

Strand is the author of Inventing Niagara, the untold story of America’s waterfall. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, The Iowa Review, and the New York Times. Her articles for This Land magazine span fracking, Oklahoma’s water wars, and homicidal truck drivers.

“Drive-By Truckers” (This Land Press, 2012)

An excerpt from Strand’s book, Killer on the Road, on highway killings.

Photo: Jesse Chan-Norris