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.

September 24 - Phoebe Gloeckner

Phoebe Gloeckner is a comic artist and author of two books, A Child’s Life and Other Stories and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, as well as several illustration projects, including those done for the RE/Search edition of J. G. Ballard's novel The Atrocity Exhibition.  Her comics work, in the form of short stories published in a variety of underground anthologies including Wimmen's Comix, Weirdo, Young Lust, and Twisted Sisters, was sporadic and rarely seen until the 1998 release of A Child's Life. The Diary of a Teenage Girl revisited the troubled life of the young character previously featured in some of her comics, this time in an unusual combination of prose, illustration, and short comics scenes. Her novel and many of her short stories are semi-autobiographical, a frequent cause of comment due to their depiction of sex, drug use, and childhood traumas; however, Gloeckner has stated that she regards them as fiction.  She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at University of Michigan.

October 22 - Betsy Wheeler

Betsy Wheeler is a poet, bookmaker, and the editor and publisher of Pilot Books. She studied English and Book Arts as an undergraduate student at UW-LaCrosse in the mid-90's, and earned her MFA in poetry at The Ohio State University. She held the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University from 2005-2007.  Her chapbook, Start Here, was published in 2007 by Small Anchor Press and will be available in September 2009 in a Chinese translation. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Bat City Review, The Journal, MiPoesias, Pebble Lake Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Octopus. She lives in Northampton, MA, where she writes, teaches, and studies yoga.

November 5 - Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central
Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international
online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat . He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, a collaborative chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and, along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.). He is a recipient of a Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism (CCT) FY09 fellowship in Poetry, is an occasional commentator on NPR and will have two chapbooks of poetry coming out in 2010.

January 28* – Dr. Ted Pelton

In addition to being a Professor in Medaille's Humanities department, Dr. Ted Pelton is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novella, "Bartleby, the Sportscaster." He has received both National Endowment for the Arts and Isherwood Fellowships for his fiction writing, and was selected as Best Fiction Writer in Western New York by Buffalo Spree magazine in 2006. His stories have been published in numerous venues, including Del Sol Review, Fiction International, Brooklyn Rail, and the anthologies The Art of Friction and Online Writing: The First Ten Years.

*Due to circumstances beyond our control, the originally scheduled appearance by Lisa Olstein has had to be cancelled.

February 11 - Lily Hoang

Lily Hoang's first book Parabola won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest in 2006. Her short novel Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press) received a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She is also the author of the forthcoming novels The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press) and Invisible Women (StepSister Press), both due out in 2010. She is an Associate Editor of Starcherone Books.

April 8 - Dan Nester

Daniel Nester is a journalist, essayist, poet, editor, and teacher. His next book, How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction, will be published by Soft Skull Press in Fall 2009. Nester's first two books, God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Poets & Writers, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Bookslut, and has been anthologized in such collections as The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1, and Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll.  He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where he teaches creative nonfiction.