Celebrating Writers and Writing in the Rochester Area since 1967

Main Page Content

Since 1967, the Brockport Writers Forum has brought hundreds of writers—novelists, poets, playwrights, memoirists, screenwriters, cartoonists, and essayists from varied traditions—to Rochester and the SUNY Brockport campus. Visitors have included Nobel laureates and Pulitzer winners as well as many just starting their careers.

An unusual aspect of the series is the Writers Forum Video Library. We began taping video interviews in our campus TV studio in the late 1960s, when Ernest J. Gaines and Richard Wilbur visited. Since that time, we have recorded around four hundred interviews with writers including Allen Ginsberg, Nadine Gordimer, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, Ishmael Reed, Robert Hayden, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Atwood, Edward Albee, June Jordan, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Muldoon, Ha Jin, Lynda Barry, and Edward P. Jones.

Many videos are available now for streaming through Brockport’s Drake Library, but not all have been digitized. You can help by making a donation to the Writers Forum Digitization Project online or by sending a check made payable to the Brockport Foundation, with fund # 567.01 noted. We appreciate your support in preserving this remarkable history.


Past Seasons


For Further Information

James Whorton
English Department
SUNY Brockport
350 New Campus Drive
Brockport, NY 14420
Phone: (585) 395-2503