In an effort to connect with the community and foster the exchange of ideas between artists and writers, 440 Gallery launched a monthly reading series in March of 2006. Readings are usually on the 3rd Sunday of each month at 4:40 pm.

Past fiction readers include Darin Strauss, Lauren Grodstein, Stephen O’Connor, Terese Svoboda, Helen Benedict, Dawn Raffel, Karen Russell, Porochista Khakpour, Scott Snyder, Bryan Charles, Rachel Sherman, Josh Harmon, Shya Scanlon, Peter Selgin, and Douglas Light. Poet readers include Susan Settlemyre-Williams, Lynne Potts, Sarah Gambito, Idra Novey, Patrick Rosal, Roger Bonair-Agard, Sara Michas-Martin, Carla Drysdale, Kate Greenstreet, Christine Hamm, Bruce MacKinnon, Matthew Thorburn, and Meghan Punschke.

Brooke Shaffner, the curator and host of the reading series, received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Hudson Review and the anthology Lost and Found: Stories from New York. She has been awarded residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Jentel, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Byrdcliffe; and scholarships from VCCA-France, Summer Literary Seminars, and the Prague Summer Program. Her novel, Fight/Flight, is represented by Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., and she is at work on a collection of stories, Borderlands. Brooke leads fiction and nonfiction workshops for both adults and teens, will co-teach a creative writing and photography workshop with photographer Amy Williams in the spring, and is the founder and director of Between the Lines NYC, which offers writing, editing, teaching, and tutoring services. See Between the Lines (NYC) for more information.