Write Thing Reading Series

Medaille College’s Write Thing Reading Series just might be one of the most eclectic visiting artist series at any educational institution in Buffalo. Each semester, Medaille invites from 3 to 6 published poets and fiction writers to campus for readings and/or class visits. Students at Medaille have the unique chance to meet up close and personal with Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award finalists, Guggenheim Fellowship recipients, and some of the most renowned international writers of today - as well as up-and-coming younger writers.

All readings are 7 p.m. Thursdays in The Library at Huber Hall, unless noted. All events are free and open to the public. Refreshments are occasionally served.

Watch videos of Aimee Parkison and Anouar Majid from the 2007-08 Write Thing Reading Series.

Fall 2008

September 18 - Fiction writer Neal Chandler

Neal Chandler is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Cleveland State University where he teaches creative writing. His published work includes Benediction: A Book of Stories; Appeal to a Lower Court, a three act play; and stories and essays in several magazines and journals. He is the former co-editor, with his wife Rebecca, of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

October 23 - Poet Christopher Schmidt

Christopher Schmidt's first book of poems, The Next in Line, is forthcoming from Slope Editions in 2008. He is currently a doctoral candidate in English literature at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Recent poems and essays can be found in Tin House, Court Green, La Petite Zine, and Canadian Poetry.

November 6 - Novelist & Poet Joshua Harmon

Joshua Harmon's debut novel, Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone Books, 2007), is at this writing one of three finalists for the First Novelist Award, awarded by Virginia Commonwealth University. His fiction and poetry have also been published in Antioch Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Verse, and many other magazines, and he has received fellowships in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He teaches at Vassar College and lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Spring 2009

February 5 – Three “XXperimental Fiction” Writers: Alexandra Chasin, Debra DiBlasi, and Nava Renek

Celebrating the publication of Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary XXperimental Prose by Women Writers

Debra Di Blasi is the recipient of many awards, including an Isherwood Foundation Fellowship, the Thorpe Menn Book Award, and the Diagram Innovative Fiction Award. Her books include The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions (FC2/University of Alabama Press); Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions); and Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press). The short film based on Drought won a host of national and international awards, and was one of only six U.S. films invited to the Universe Elle section of the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. Debra is president of Jaded Ibis Productions, producing fictive audio interviews and music, videos, print, web and visual art, and the innovative literature and arts channel, BLEED.

Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By (FC2, 2007), a collection of short fictions. Her creative work has been published in print in AGNI, Chain, Phoebe, sleepingfish, and Denver Quarterly, and online in Exquisite Corpse, DIAGRAM, and elimae, among other places. Chasin is the Associate Chair of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School.

Nava Renek, besides being the editor of Wreckage of Reason, is an educator and writer whose fiction and non-fiction has been published in a number of literary magazines and websites. Her first novel, Spiritland (Spuyten Duyvil), was published in 2002. She is a world traveler (Spiritland is based in Thailand), and serves also Program Coordinator at The Women’s Center at Brooklyn College.

March 26 - Poet Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith was raised in Northern California. After receiving degrees in English and Creative Writing from Harvard College and Columbia University, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1997-99. Her book, The Body's Question, was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Kevin Young, and published in 2003 by Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and a 2005 Whiting Writers' Award. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Callaloo, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, The Nebraska Review, Post Road, West Branch, and anthologies Poetry 30, Poetry Daily, Autumn House, and elsewhere. She teaches in Creative Writing at Princeton University.

April 16 - Fiction writer Steve Katz

Steve Katz has written and published continuously since the self-published novella, The Lestriad, in 1962. His books have appeared from Holt, Random House, Knopf, Ithaca House, Sun & Moon, Bamberger Books. William Bamberger (Bamberger Books) has called Steve Katz "the most important living American novelist." Katz was one of the founders of Fiction Collective, now more than 30 years later, FC2. He taught Creative Writing and literature at Cornell University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, The University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, The University of Notre Dame, and The University of Colorado in Boulder, from which he retired in 2003. His 1995 novel, Swanny's Ways, won an America Award. Katz's newest book is KISSSSS, a Miscellany.