A few years back, Joel Whitney and Michael Archer started up a reading series at a Manhattan bar called Guernica. “We’d both given and been to thousands of readings and wanted to do a series that was fun and casual and included music and mingling before and after the reading,” Archer recalls. As the events started to draw a regular crowd, the two men teamed up with Josh Jones and Beth Onusko to create an online “magazine of art and politics,” named Guernica after the bar. The readings have tapered off, but the website continues, celebrating its third anniversary tonight with a benefit party held on a Hudson River cruise ship. Special guests for the evening will include authors Melissa Bank and Oscar Hijuelos, who will joined by Frederic Tuten for a discussion the latter describes as “a most casual [conversation] about our respective writing and our general and creative interests.”

The funds raised will go towards the magazine’s newly launched print edition. “Some of our readers continue to see the print format as ideal for our longer interviews, essays, fiction…even some poems,” Archer explains. Among the pieces tapped for the first issue: a long poem from Richard Howard.