VOICES Reading Series, 2019-2022 Archive

Thursday, October 27, 2022:
DPC 7:30: Don Lee

Don Lee is the author, most recently, of the story collection The Partition. He is also the author of the collection Yellow and the novels Country of Origin, Wrack and Ruin, The Collective, and Lonesome Lies Before Us. He has received an American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives near Baltimore with his wife, the writer Jane Delury, and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Thursday, November 17, 2022:
DPC 7:30: Teri Ellen Cross Davis

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the 2022 recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize, and a Cave Canem fellow. She was recently nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy award in poetry. She curates the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series and is Poetry Programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

Thursday, December 8, 2022:
DPC 7:30: Cecily Parks

Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O’Nights. Her more recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. The poetry editor for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University and lives in Austin.

Thursday, September 9, 2021:
DPC 8:15: Luisa A. Igloria

Originally from Baguio City, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis. (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. Luisa was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize (UK) for ecopoetry and is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University. She also leads workshops for The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. In July 2020, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Academy of American Poets awarded her one of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, in support of public poetry projects.

Thursday, October 21, 2021:
DPC 8:15: Eva Freeman

Eva Freeman is an Adjunct Lecturer at Baruch College and a former producer for ABC News. Her short story, “In the Aftermath,” was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize and is published in Granta. Her work has also been published in The Catamaran Literary Journal, The Salt Hill Journal, and Black Renaissance Noire among others. She received a BA in English from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Thursday, November 4, 2021:
DPC 8:15: Quintin Collins

Quintin Collins (he/him) is a writer, editor, and Solstice MFA Program assistant director. His work appears in many print and online publications, and his first full-length collection of poems is The Dandelion Speaks of Survival (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2021). His second collection of poems, Claim Tickets for Stolen People, selected by Marcus Jackson as a winner of The Journal’s 2020 Charles B. Wheeler Prize, is forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books. Quintin’s awards include a Pushcart Prize and the 2019 Atlantis Award from the Poet’s Billow, and his other accolades include Best of the Net nominations.

Thursday, December 2, 2021:
DPC 8:15: Paul Griner

Paul Griner is the author of the recently published novel The Book of Otto and Liam. Earlier work are the novels Collectors, The German Woman, and Second Life, and the story collections Follow Me (a Barnes and Nobel Discover Great New Writers pick) and Hurry Please, I Want to Know (winner of the 2016 Kentucky Literary Award). His work has been published in Playboy, Ploughshares, One Story, Zoetrope, Narrative, Tin House, and Bomb. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Louisville.

Thursday, January 28: Stephen Schottenfeld
8:15 PM by Zoom

Stephen Schottenfeld has published a novel, Bluff City Pawn, with Bloomsbury USA, and he has recently completed his next novel, entitled This Room Is Made of Noise. His stories have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, and have garnered a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant, a Halls Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and special mentions in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Thursday, February 18: José Torres-Tama, in collaboration with ILC
8:15 p.m. by Zoom

Ecuadorian-born immigrant, José Torres-Tama is a performance and visual artist, published poet and playwright, cultural activist and director of ArteFuturo Productions in New Orleans. His radical Taco Truck Theater ensemble project on wheels exploring the anti-immigrant hysteria received a prestigious MAPFUND grant, and he is an NEA award-recipient for his performance and installation work. Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers is his critically acclaimed sci-fi Latino noir performance solo that has sold out a two hundred-seat theater at University, and theaters in Los Angeles, Houston, Minneapolis, and New Vanderbilt Orleans. From 2006 to 2011, he contributed post-Katrina commentaries that aired on NPR’s Latino USA. Northwestern University Press published the full performance script of his Aliens solo in a 2019 anthology titled Encuentro: New Latinx Performances for the American Theater. Diálogos Books New Orleans published Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares, a debut poetry collection of 25 years of socially conscious verse.

Monday, March 1, Lucille Clifton Award
7:00 p.m. by Zoom

Lucille Clifton Award: Li-Young Lee and Leah Naomi Green
Li Young Lee is the author of The Undressing (W. W. Norton, 2018); Behind My Eyes (W. W. Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions, 1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award.

He has been the recipient of a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, the I. B. Lavan Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

Leah Naomi Green
Leah Naomi Green grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. She received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Her first full-length poetry collection, The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press, 2020) was selected by Li-Young Lee as the winner of the 2019 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets.

Thursday, April 1: Fifty Years of Poetry at St. Mary’s College of Maryland
8:15 p.m. by Zoom

Fifty Years of Poetry at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (hosted by Professor Emeritus Michael Glaser)

Josiah Royce wrote: “If you cannot find the beloved community, create it”: for over 50 years, writers at St. Mary’s have been reading, studying, creating, exploring, and sharing. Their work and passions have developed into a culture and community at the college that engages in examining, through the arts, what it means to be human.

This event will celebrate some of the stories about the importance of such a culture that are newly published in the anthology A Community of VOICES. Featured will be Judith Hall, Grace Cavalieri, Kaia Sand, Michael Glaser and Karen Anderson, among others.

Thursday, September 3, 4:00 p.m. – 5:40 p.m. by Zoom

Yona Harvey: Write Yourself Into a Comic: No-Stress Comics Journaling for Beginners

In this stimulating, no-stress lecture, you will learn how to panel, draw, and narrate a comic. Through a series of brief writing exercises you’ll highlight memorable moments from your life and turn them into story. Fictional and poetic embellishments are encouraged. We’ll view some classic comic book layouts for inspiration. Each participant will leave with a mini comic and ideas for making many more. No drawing experience necessary! (Have a notebook/journal and some blank paper ready for your ideas!)

Yona Harvey contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda and co-authored with Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther and the Crew.  She has worked with teenagers writing about mental health issues in collaboration with Creative Nonfiction magazine and received the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland for her poetry; she is the author of the poetry collections You Don’t Have To Go To Mars for Love (Four Way Books) and Hemming the Water (Four Way Books), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  Her website is yonaharvey.com.

Thursday, September 24, 8:15 p.m. by Zoom

Poet Yona Harvey

Yona Harvey will read from her new poetry collection, You Don’t Have To Go To Mars for Love

Yona Harvey is the author of the poetry collections You Don’t Have To Go To Mars for Love (Four Way Books) and Hemming the Water (Four Way Books), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda and co-authored with Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther and the Crew. She has worked with teenagers writing about mental health issues in collaboration with Creative Nonfiction magazine and received the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her website is yonaharvey.com.

Thursday, October 22, 8:15 p.m. by Zoom

Fiction Writer Tope Folarin

Tope Folarin will read from his new novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man.

Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington, DC. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013 and was shortlisted once again in 2016. He was also recently named to the Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of A Particular Kind of Black Man.

Thursday, November 12, 8:15 p.m. by Zoom

Really Recent Alumni Reading

Alumni readers from ’18, ’19, and ’20 will read poetry, fiction, and nonfiction!

Thursday, January 30: Joe Hall (SMCM Alumnus) (DPC, 8:15 PM)

Joe Hall is a writer, teacher, and researcher in Buffalo and Ithaca, New York. Joe has authored three collections of poetry: Someone’s Utopia, The Devotional Poems, and Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean 2013 & 2010). With Chad Hardy, he co-authored The Container Store Vols I & II (SpringGun 2012). With Cheryl Quimba, he co-authored May I Softly Walk (Poetry Crush 2014). With Ryan Kaveh Sheldon and Angela Veronica Wong, he participates in Hostile Books, a publishing collective dedicated to radical materiality. His poems have been translated into Dutch and he has done readings at universities, bars, squats and rivers in most of the 50 states as well as Canada and Washington, DC. Hall has taught community based creative writing workshops through the Worker Center in Buffalo and Just Buffalo Literary Center. Joyous Shrub 666, a 3 piece surf punk outfit, tolerates his bass playing.

Thursday, February 20: r. erica doyle (DPC, 8:15)

r. erica doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents. Her debut collection, proxy (Belladonna* Books, 2013), won the 2014 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing. Erica received her MFA in Poetry from The New School, and lives in New York City, where she is an administrator in the NYC public schools and facilitates Tongues Afire: A Free Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.

Saturday, February 29, Lucille Clifton Award: Naomi Shihab Nye and Danusha Laméris (7:30 PM, DPC)

Please note a conversation between the poets will be also held 2:30-4 PM, place TBA.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East , A Maze Me: (Poems for Girls, ) and There Is No Long Distance Now (a collection of very short stories). Other works include several prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including  This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East. collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award Her new book of poems is The Tiny Journalist  (BOA Editions Ltd., April 2019).

Danusha Laméris lives in Santa Cruz, California, where, after completing a B.A. in Studio Art at U.C. Santa Cruz. She was born in Massachusetts and raised in California. She has also studied at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshops and with the poets  Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar, among others. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The SUN, Tin House. and In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare among others venues.. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, is coming out with University of Pittsburgh Press in spring 2020.

VOICES gratefully acknowledges that this event is organized and funded by the Office of the President.

Thursday, April 9: Student Selected Reader Alexandra Elle (DPC, 8:15 PM)

Alexandra Elle is an author & wellness consultant living in the Washington, DC metro area with her husband and children. Writing came into her life by way of therapy and the exploration of healing through journaling. Quarterly, Alex teaches workshops and retreats centered around assisting others in finding their voices through storytelling, poetry, and narrative writing rooted in truth without shame. Her mission is to build community & self-care practices through literature & language. She is currently an author at Chronicle Books.

Alex is the author of Words From A Wanderer, Love In My Language, and Neon Soul, as well as #ANote2Self Meditation Journal, Growing in Gratitude Journal: 150 Days of Giving Thanks, and Today I Affirm: A Journal That Nurtures Self-Care. She also hosts the hey, girl. podcast.

Thursday, April 23: Stephen Schottenfeld and Greg Downs (DPC, 8:15 PM)

Please note that the Department of History will host a lecture by Greg Downs on Wednesday, 4/23, time and place TBA.

Stephen Schottenfeld has published a novel, Bluff City Pawn, with Bloomsbury USA. He has completed a story collection, Miss Ellen Jameson Is Not Deceased, and he is currently at work on his next novel. His narratives often trace the work lives of his characters—pawnbrokers, postal carriers, telephone repairmen, home inspectors, police detectives, clothing manufacturers, trailer-park owners, to name a few—and explore how these professions bring an individual into a unique set of experiences and conflicts and expressions. His stories have been published in numerous literary magazines and have garnered a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant, a Halls Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and special mentions in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies.

Greg Downs is the author of the Flannery O’Connor Award-winning short story collection, Spit Baths, published in 2006 by the University of Georgia Press and of the history book Declarations of Dependence published in 2011 by the University of North Carolina Press. Spit Baths has been called “masterful” and “rich and mesmerizing” by the Philadelphia Inquirer; a “founding myth for a racially integrated South” by the San Francisco Chronicle; and a “luminous new collection” by Small Spiral Notebook. Downs’ stories have been published in numerous literary magazines such as the Black Warrior Review, Glimmer Train, and Meridian,. He graduated from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which awarded him a James Michener/Copernicus Society of America fellowship. His writing has been called “thoroughly original and completely authentic” by fellow Kentucky native Fenton Johnson.

Along with his fiction writing, Downs is also an historian, with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation supervisor was historian Steven Hahn. He studies 19th-century American political culture, and is an associate professor at the University of California, Davis.^[1] Declarations of Dependence was called “brilliant, imaginative, and deeply researched” by historian Scott Nelson, a “rare achievement” by historian Laura Edwards, and a “carefully crafted and deeply researched study” by Civil War historian James M. McPherson.

VOICES gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Alliance, the Lecture and Fine Arts Committee, the Department of History, and the Department of English.