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Dodge PerformingVOICES Reading Series, Archive
VOICES Fall Schedule 2023-2024
Thursday, January 25: Good Eats Group Reading
Introduced by Professors Jennifer Cognard Black & Melissa Goldthwaite
Join nonfiction writers Jennifer Cognard-Black, Melissa Goldthwaite, SMCM alum Will Becker, Adrienne Su, and Taté Walker to celebrate the publication of Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically newly out from NYU Press and co-edited by Dr. Cognard-Black!
Will Becker is a writer and St. Mary’s College of Maryland alumnus who went on to earn his MA in Critical & Creative Writing from the University of Sussex, where he graduated at the top of his program. His work has appeared in such publications as Quick Fiction UK, Patapsco Valley Living, and SlackWater, while his essay “Men & Meat” can be found in Good Eats, an anthology recently published by NYU Press. He lives in Atlanta.
Jennifer Cognard-Black, Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland teaches seminars in women novelists, Victorian adaptations, and the literatures of food as well as writing workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction, and food writing. A two-time Fulbright scholar to The Netherlands and Slovenia and the winner of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, Jennifer has produced two lecture series with The Great Courses and one for Audible on Food & Fiction. She is also the author or co-editor of six books, including two collections of food writing, both co-edited with her long-time collaborator Melissa Goldthwaite: Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal and a second volume of creative nonfiction essays, Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically.
Melissa A. Goldthwaite, Professor of English, teaches rhetorical theory and creative writing at Saint Joseph’s University. Melissa is the author or co-editor of many books, including The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing (with Cheryl Glenn); Surveying the Literary Landscapes of Terry Tempest Williams (with Katherine R. Chandler); The Norton Pocket Book of Writing by Students; The Norton Reader (with Joseph Bizup and Anne Fernald); Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics; Books That Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (with Jennifer Cognard-Black); The Little Norton Reader: 50 Essays from the First Fifty Years; and Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically (with Jennifer Cognard-Black).
Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Peach State (2021), which was named a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry. Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and The Frost Place. An Atlanta native, Adrienne lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is Professor of Creative Writing at Dickinson College. Her first collection of essays, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, is forthcoming from Paul Dry Books in 2024.
Taté Walker (they/them) is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller for outlets such as The Nation, Everyday Feminism, Native Peoples Magazine, Indian Country Today, and ANMLY. Their work is also featured in several anthologies, including FIERCE: Essays by and about Dauntless Women, South Dakota in Poems, and W. W. Norton’s Everyone’s an Author. Their first full-length poetry book, The Trickster Riots, was published in 2022, by Abalone Mountain Press. Taté is a 2023 ASU Poetry & the Senses Fellow and the 2023 Storyknife Fireweed Fellow. Taté uses their fifteen-plus years of experience working for daily newspapers, social justice organizations, and tribal education systems to organize students and professionals around issues of critical cultural competency, anti-racism / anti-bias, and inclusive community building. Find out more at www.jtatewalker.com.
Thursday, February 15: Poet Valerie Martínez (7:30, Daugherty Palmer Commons)
Introduced by Karen Leona Anderson, co-sponsored by ENST
Valerie Martínez is the author of five books of poetry, one book of translations (of Uruguay’s Delmira Agustini) and a chapbook of hybrid poetry and prose. Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies, journals, and magazines including The Best American Poetry; Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance, and Poetry. Her most recent work, Count, is a book-length poem that grapples with the devastating effects of human-made climate change while recounting the magnificent wonders of the natural world. Martínez is also an educator, having taught poetry and literature for over twenty years at the college/university level. Since 2008, Martínez has worked as an arts administrator and consultant in the field of arts and community development. She is the Founding Director of Artful Life, an organization dedicated to works of public art created through a place-based, community engagement process. She was the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico from 2008-2010. Learn more: www.valeriemartinez.net
Thursday February 29: Lucille Clifton Legacy Award: Martín Espada and John Murillo (7:00 PM, Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center)
Reception held from 6-7 PM in the Performing Arts Center Lobby
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a Massachusetts Book Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. http://www.martinespada.net/
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Four Way Books 2020; Cypher 2010), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award. His many honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Recently, his poems appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. He is an Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University.
Thursday, March 28: José Torres-Tama (7:30 PM, Performing Arts Center
Introduced by Professor José Ballesteros, co-sponsored by ILC and IDEAA
Join us for a performance by José Torres-Tama, co-sponsored by ILC and in celebration of the partnership between SMCM and Zozobra Publishing!
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.
Thursday, April 18 Poet Hai Dang Phan (7:30 PM, DPC)
Introduced by Professor Beth Charlebois
Hai-Dang Phan is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is the author of the poetry collection Reenactments (Sarabande, 2019) and the translator of Phan Nhiên Hạo’s selected volume of poems, Paper Bells (The Song Cave, 2020). His poems and translations have appeared in Best American Poetry 2016, New England Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Asymptote, and Mekong Review. Phan is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the American Literary Translators Association. He holds a Ph.D. in literary studies from the University of Wisconsin and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Florida. He currently teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa City.
Thursday, September 12: Poet Ariana Benson
7:30, Daugherty Palmer Commons
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Prize and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Benson Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students. and also holds Masters of Arts degrees in both Poetic Practice and Scriptwriting, which she earned as a Marshall Scholar. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.
Thursday, October 17: Nonfiction Writers Mary Quade and Cris Harris
7:30, Daugherty Palmer Commons
Introduced by Professors Jerry Gabriel and Jennifer Cognard-Black
Mary Quade is the author of Zoo World: Essays (The Ohio State University Press / Mad Creek Imprints), winner of the 2022 The Journal Non/Fiction Prize, and two poetry collections: Guide to Native Beasts (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Local Extinctions (Gold Wake). She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship and four Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards for both poetry and creative nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Hiram College and lives in northeast Ohio.
Cris Harris is an award-winning educator and author of I Have Not Loved You With My Whole Heart (Oregon State University Press 2021) a memoir about growing up in a household wrestling with faith, addiction, violence and the AIDS epidemic. As Hawken School’s Dean of Experiential Education, he builds and promotes learning opportunities that put the experience of the student at the center of education, including international expeditions, backcountry courses, hands-on wilderness medicine, and investigative journalism. Cris spends summers running, writing, growing tomatoes and restoring a turn-of-the-century barn. He’s currently at work on a collection of essays about paradox in memory, science and religion. His work has been recognized with two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards for non-fiction.
Thursday, November 14: Fiction Writer Ghassan Zeineddine
7:30, Daugherty Palmer Commons
Introduced by Professor Nadeem Zaman
Ghassan Zeineddine is the author of the story collection Dearborn and co-editor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging.
Dearborn was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award for Debut Fiction, shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. The story collection was named a 2024 Michigan Notable Book, a 2024 American Library Association Notable Book, and a Best Fiction Book of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the Chicago Public Library, and a Good Housekeeping Best Book of Fall and a Washington Post Best Book of September, among other honors. Zeineddine lives with his wife and two daughters in Ohio, where he’s an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College.
Thursday, December 5: Fiction Writer Wayne Karlin
7:30, Daugherty Palmer Commons
Wayne Karlin has published nine novels: The Genizah (Publerati) A Wolf by the Ears,(UMass Press); Marble Mountain, The Wished-For Country, and Prisoners, (Curbstone Press); Lost Armies, Us.The Extras (Henry Holt); Crossover, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), a collection of short stories, Memorial Days (Texas Tech University Press,) and three works of non-fiction: Rumors and Stones, War Movies (Curbstone Press), and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books). He has received six State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in the Arts Award in, and the 2019 Juniper Prize for Fiction for A Wolf by the Ears.
