VOICES Fall Schedule 2024
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.
About
The VOICES Reading Series, established by poets Lucille Clifton and Michael Glaser over 30 years ago, features poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers and is intended to bring accomplished writers to the campus to interact with students and faculty. Invited writers read their works throughout the semester on Thursday evenings at 8:15 P.M at Daugherty-Palmer Commons, and all readings are free and open to the public. Once or twice a month, authors give a short reading and then respond during a brief question and answer period. Each reading is followed by a reception, where students and faculty can mingle with the author and other interested writers and readers. The author’s book(s) are also sold during the reception and can be signed by the author. Luminaries such as Mark Doty, Elizabeth Alexander, Toni Morrison, and Naomi Shihab Nye have read in the series.
Information on events are posted throughout campus, and emails are sent out near the date of the readings; please contact the director, Karen Leona Anderson (klanderson@smcm.edu) if you would like to be added to these notifications. In addition, all the events and information on the authors can be found at our Facebook page: Creative Writing Resources at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
