English

Photo: Professor Christopher Bakken has been coordinating the Single Voice Reading Series for 15 years.

By Lauren Dominique ’16

Every year, a handful of world-class writers visit the Allegheny campus, holding conferences with students and engaging audiences in readings of their work.

The Single Voice Reading Series provides Allegheny students with an intimate opportunity to hear and meet nationally known writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Coordinated by Christopher Bakken, professor of English and creative writing, the series has been bringing guest writers to Allegheny since the early 1980s.

Since Bakken began coordinating the series in 2000, the venue has been moved several times to accommodate larger audiences. “At Allegheny, crowds of over 125 people now attend each Single Voice reading, while audiences for such readings at other universities are typically only a fraction of that size,” says Bakken.  He attributes the large crowd to the intimacy Allegheny fosters between the writers and the students before the authors even set foot on campus: “We integrate all visiting writers into our courses in such a way that students are encountering not just writers, but people they already feel they know.”

In years past, the Single Voice Reading Series has welcomed a variety of famous authors, including John Updike, Mark Doty, Scott Russell Sanders, Tobias Wolff, W.D. Snodgrass, and Carolyn Forché. But the series also mixes in writers at the beginning of their careers, including many who are promoting first books. This year, Allegheny will bring another six writers to campus.

Poets Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs visited Allegheny in September to launch the series for this academic year.  “I’ve done quite a few visits like this one,” said Nickole Brown, “but I’ll tell you what Allegheny has unlike anyplace else – Christopher Bakken.”

In addition to their Thursday evening reading, Brown and Jacobs spent two days in-class and on-campus: holding conferences with Allegheny writers, attending question-and-answer sessions, and having intense intellectual conversations with students who have read their work and share their appreciation of poetry.

“This personal connection between the visiting authors and Allegheny students is what distinguishes our series from other reading series. You make contact with living writers, and that allows you to peer through a window to see what the writing profession looks like as it is lived,” says Bakken.

Author Jessica Jacobs agreed that this personal connection is crucial to herself and young writers. “While my undergraduate and graduate workshop leaders helped build in me a foundation of craft and criticism, it was visiting writers – with their flurries or disparate opinions and styles, backgrounds and antidotes – who for me most often sparked new work.  Time with different authors – in person or on the page – can offer new pathways to finding those inner resources. Each writer is a potential portal to what you already have within you,” says Jacobs.

This familiarity between the readers and students leaves a long-lasting impression on students, “Well, if writing is mainly a lonely practice for our students (as it often is), a reading series like presents a unique opportunity where writers and audience come face-to-face,” says Bakken.

For weeks after the September readings, students were still talking about the powerful impact the two women had on them.

“The value of this experience lies in the open communication between author and student,” says Maria Liuzzo ’16, English major and psychology minor. “After spending so much time studying Pelvis with Distance and Fanny Says, many questions came about. The open panel with Jacobs and Brown during class gave a chance to have those questions answered.”

As a student in Bakken’s Advanced Writing Poetry Workshop, Liuzzo had the opportunity to meet with Brown and Jacobs not only in a group setting, but in a one-on-one conference to review her own poetry. This experience, she says, was uniquely valuable for her as a writer and as a student: “Having a published author read my work and take notes on it was intimidating, just as listening to the authors read their work was exciting. As an Allegheny student, I know have the resources to follow my passion and be successful right at my fingertips. It’s through these connections that we find our path.”

Authors Brown and Jacobs said they were impressed with the caliber of Allegheny students. “The two of Professor Bakken’s classes that we visited were well-prepared and enthusiastic, and the participants had given an astoundingly close read of both of our books,” says Brown. “It made for such a welcoming and invigorating experience for us; rarely as poets are we given the opportunity to have such in-depth, meaningful conversations with our readers.”

Learn more about the 2015-16 Single Voice Reading Series.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research