Sponsored by the John C. Sturtevant Memorial Lectureship
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, Jane Hirshfield, W.D. Snodgrass, Richard Blanco, Robert Olen Butler, Henri Cole, Edward Hirsch, Afaa Michael Weaver, Tim O’Brien, and Mark Doty. Look at the archives for a more complete list.
The Single Voice Reading Series is organized by the Department of English at Allegheny College. For more information, contact Christopher Bakken, Professor of English.
Single Voice Reading Series 2026-2027
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems. He edited the nonfiction collection Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and professor of environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University.
A wilderness guide before she began writing, Beth Peterson’s first book, Dispatches from the End of Ice (2019), chronicles a story of melting glaciers, European climate science, and the disappearance of Peterson’s friend. Peterson’s essays and scholarship appear in Essay Daily, Fourth Genre, Newfound, Flyway, Terrain.org, the Edinburgh Companion to the Essay and other journals. She teaches nonfiction at Grand Valley State University and edits for Seneca Review.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron, was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award and the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University.
Thursday, February 11, 2027
Alisa Alering is the author of the novel Smothermoss (2024), a Shirley Jackson Award Finalist. Alering won the GLCA New Writers Award in Fiction for 2026 and was the 2025 Joan Perry Barnes Fellow for Crime Fiction at Storyknife Writers Retreat. A former librarian and science and technology reporter, they grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania and now live in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.
Tuesday, March 2, 2027
Dani Janae (Allegheny Alumna)
Dani Janae ‘14 is the author of Hound Triptych (2026). A poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, her work has been published in places including RHINO, Longleaf
Review, SWWIM, Palette Poetry, and South Florida Poetry Journal. She teaches at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.