Visiting Artists

CROSSING THE LINES:    LIVING WRITERS SERIES 2012

All Events Open to the Campus and Community
Room 132, Campus Center Auditorium, 3-4:20PM

Note: All talks are on Mondays except for Jon Chopan, who will visit on a Tuesday

Writers are often pigeon-holed, by publishers and readers alike, into a single category.  Writer X is known for romances featuring vampires; Writer Y focuses on short stories about New England life; Writer Z produces edgy, humorous poems. This year in Living Writers we'll meet multi-disciplinary or multi-genre artists who bend definitions and broaden the concept of what it means to be a writer.  Visitors will be proficient in more than one genre or field, or create works that are not easily categorized.  Kimi Eisele is a writer, dancer, and artist; Susan Fox Rogers combines local history, memoir and the personal essay to create a tribute to the Hudson River and her parents; Jon Chopan crosses the fiction/nonfiction line freely; and SUNY Oswego alum Samantha Shelton uses her creative writing and journalism education to make inroads in the competitive world of New York City magazine writing.  Prize-winning authors Beth Alvarado, Patrick Lawler, and Marge Pellegrino thread fact and imagination to weave stories, essays, novels and poems.

September 10:  Multi-disciplinary artist Kimi Eisele will share how writing has infiltrated her artistic endeavors and community-based projects and how "being a writer" has meant more than putting words on paper. Her talk will explore how conversations and essays can reveal community; how words and text enhance dance, visual arts, and even online social networking; and how our words can become literary activism.

September 18: SUNY Oswego alum Jon Chopan blends letters, stories, obits and writing fragments in his new autobiographical novel, Pulled from the River.  He creates a chilling view of what it means to grow up in a city haunted by the serial killer Arthur Shawcross.

September 24: In My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir, author Susan Fox Rogers guides the reader through both her own memories and down the Hudson River.  Part nature guide, part history, part memoir, this nonfiction work is beautifully evocative of the way memory shapes experience.

October 8: Marge Pellegrino weaves narrative, dreams, and folktales in her prize-winning novel, Journey of Dreams.  The story follows Tomasa, a Guatamalan teen seeking refuge, as she travels north to Mexico and Arizona in hopes of reuniting her family.  Pellegrino will talk about how expressive-arts work with refugees inspired the book, and about how writing can be a tool for healing and building community.

October 29: Tucson fiction and nonfiction writer Beth Alvarado layers portraits, scenes, memories, and dreams in her new work, Anthropologies.  The stories, which are both fragmentary and cohesive, overlap and accumulate to reveal tenderness and grief in this lovely, cross-cultural "web of interrelationships."  

November 5: Samantha Shelton, a graduate of SUNY Oswego's creative writing and journalism programs, returns to talk about her work at Fitness Magazine.  Having advanced from reader, to intern, to freelancer, to full-time employee, Shelton will discuss how her college experiences - writing for the Oswegonian, establishing the local chapter of Ed 2010, and getting Her Campus up and running - helped her find success in the competitive world of New York City magazine writing.

November 12: "Jack of all trades, master of none."  Patrick Lawler proves this saying wrong, writing beautifully and compellingly in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.  He teaches in multiple genres as well, and is the ecopoetry and drama editor for a leading literary journal.  Lawler will talk about his book Underground (Notes toward an Autobiography), which is "part interview, part poetry, part elegy for his father, part examination of how a son with this particular father became a writer..."

 

Past Visiting Artists

Lee K. Abbott

Diana Abu-Jaber

Pius Adesanmi

Carolyn Alessio

Laurie Halse Anderson

Paul Aviles

Pope Brock

Sarah Browning

Michael Burkard

Jon Chopan

Jaime Wriston Colbert

Gail Danley

Arthur Flowers

Richard Ford

Susan Fox Rogers

Jeffrey Gardiner

Sheila Gillooly

Lucy Grealy

Amy Hassinger

Edward P. Jones

Donald Justice

Tracey Kendall

Chris Kennedy

Chip Kidd

Stephen Kuusisto

Steve Langan

Li-Young Lee

Carl Lennertz

M.L. Liebler

Jeremy Manier

Lee Martin

Alice McDermott

Phillip Memmer

Bill Miller

Stephen Murabito

Joan Murray

Michael Neff

Bruce Pandolfo with Phillip Elliot

Ann Panning

Robert Perkins

Charles Plymell

Georgia Popoff

Lee Ann Roripaugh

Peggy Shaw

Mark St. Germain

Mark Haskell Smith

Sue Williams Smith

Michael Steinberg

Ira Sukrungruang

William Trowbridge

Lewis Turco

Tobias Wolff

Daniel Woodrell

Vanessa Woods

Jeff Woodnough

Teri Youmans Grimm