Thursday, July 12: Michael Downs joins us from Baltimore for a reading from his new novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist. 7pm.

The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist marks Downs’s third book set in his hometown of Hartford. Others include The Greatest Show: Stories, and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City, which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. A former newspaper reporter, Downs is an associate professor of English at Towson University. He lives and writes in Baltimore.