Please Note: The COVID-19 Pandemic has forced the Writers Forum reading series to move online. Our readings will be hosted on Zoom, and will be accessible to one and all, near and far. Zoom links will be posted one week prior to the particular reading. You may request a Zoom link by emailing Writers Forum Director, Ralph Black: rwblack@brockport.edu.
Spring 2021 Schedule
Gail Hosking (Poet, Essayist)
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3 AT 6:30 PM
Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter, the poetry chapbook The Tug, and a recent book of poems Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). Her poems and essays have been published in River Teeth, Timberline Review, Lillith Magazine, and Post Road, among others. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for fifteen years.
Victoria Chang (Poet)
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17 AT 6:30 PM
Victoria Chang’s newest poetry collection is OBIT (Copper Canyon) which was nominated for a National Book Award. Other collections are Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. She also edited an anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (Univ. of Illinois, 2014). Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy? illustrated by Marla Frazee, and was named a NYT Notable Book. Her middle grade verse novel, Love, Love was just published by Sterling Publishing.
Among Chang’s many awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim and Katherine Min MacDowell Foundations, and a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan Residency Fellowship. She is the Program Chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA Program.
Dexter Filkins (Journalist, Essayist)
(Art of Fact Award Recipient)
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7 AT 6:30 PM
Dexter Filkins joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2011. He has written about the murder of a journalist in Pakistan, the uprisings in Yemen, the war in Afghanistan, the crises in Syria and Lebanon. Filkins worked as the New Delhi bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, before joining the New York Times, where, in 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of journalists covering Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In 2006-07, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and, from 2007-08, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has received numerous prizes, including two George Polk Awards and three Overseas Press Club Awards. Filkins’s debut work of nonfiction, The Forever War, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book and was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The Boston Globe.
Peter Benson (Novelist)
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21 AT 6:30 PM
Disillusioned and frustrated with academia, Peter Benson left the University of Edinburgh in 1975, took a summer job on a farm in Lincolnshire, and spent the following eight years working his way around Europe and North Africa.
In 1983, following a motorcycle accident in Morocco, he returned to the UK and took a job in a basket making workshop in Somerset - which inspired his first novel, The Levels. Published in 1987, it won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Author’s Club First Novel Award. Benson has since published ten more novels, as well as short stories, screenplays and poetry. His work has been translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Vietnamese. Recent novels include: Isabel’s Skin, The South in Winter, and (his latest) The Stromness Dinner. He currently lives in the South West of England.
Rion Amilcar Scott (Fiction writer)
WEDNESDAY, MAY 5 AT 6:30 PM
Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the short story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton, 2019). His debut collection, Insurrections, was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020, among other places.
He was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland and earned an MFA from George Mason University where he won the Mary Roberts Rinehart award, and an Alumni Exemplar Award. He has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writing Conference, Kimbilio and the Colgate Writing Conference as well as a 2019 Maryland Individual Artist Award. Presently he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.