VOICES Reading Series

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 immagrant, 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.