English

The Single Voice Reading Series provides students with an opportunity to hear and meet nationally known writers. Readers have included John Updike, Carolyn Forché, Tobias Wolff, W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Olen Butler, Tim O’Brien, and Mark Doty. Look at the archives for a more complete list.

The Creative Writing Program of the Allegheny College Department of English sponsors the Single Voice Reading Series. For more information, contact Christopher Bakken, associate professor of English.

Single Voice Reading Series 2011-12

Carolyn Forché
Thursday, September 29^th, 8pm.  Tillotson Room

Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry, including The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, Blue Hour, and Gathering The Tribes.  She has been awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award, in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture.  Forché’s other books include the landmark anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, as well as translations of Claribel Alegria, Robert Desnos, and Mahmoud Darwish.  She is Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetry and Professor of English at Georgetown University.

Shara McCallum
Thursday, October 27^th, 2011  8pm. Tillotson Room

Shara McCallum is the author of four books of poetry: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us.  Her poems have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, UK, Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel. Originally from Jamaica, she lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she directs the Stadler Center for Poetry and teaches at Bucknell University.

Matthew Ferrence
November 15^th,  8pm. Tillotson Room

Matthew Ferrence recently joined the English department faculty at Allegheny College after stints in journalism and tournament golf.   His essays have appeared in several journals, including Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Concho Creek Review, and Puckerbrush Review.

 

Nick Lantz & Andrew Mulvania
Thursday, March 8^th, 2012.    Tillotson Room, 8pm

Nick Lantz is the author of two recent books of poetry—We Don’t Know We Don’t Know and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House—with a third book, How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance, due out in 2014.  Lantz earned his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was the 2010-2011 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.   He currently teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College.

Andrew Mulvania is Associate Professor of English at Washington & Jefferson College. His first book of poems, Also In Arcadia, was published in 2008. Recent poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Southwest Review, The Missouri Review, and The Hudson Review. He was the recipient of a 2008 Individual Artists Fellowship in Poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and was a poet-in-residence at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center in the summer of 2011.

 

Pam Houston
Tuesday, April 10^th, 2012.  8pm, Tillotson Room.

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat , which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction; two novels, Contents May Have Shifted (forthcoming, 2012); and Sight Hound (2006), all published by W.W. Norton & Co.; and two collections of autobiographical essays, A Rough guide to the Heart and A Little More About Me.  Houston has also edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction and poetry entitled Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry . She teaches at University of California, Davis.