Award-winning author and SUNY Oswego professor Soma Mei Sheng Frazier will be the next featured guest in the Living Writers Series at 3 p.m. on Monday, Oct, 13 in the Marano Campus Center auditorium (room 132).
The event will include a reading from her novel "Off the Books," followed by a Q&A and book signing. It is free and open to the campus and the community.
Although currently on sabbatical, Frazier is making a special return for this appearance.
“We’re particularly lucky to have Soma join us this semester,” said Living Writers Series organizer Sari Fordham. “I love how 'Off the Books' draws readers into a road trip novel and then surprises them with a geopolitical twist. Soma is a daring and brilliant writer, and I’m excited about what students will learn from her presentation.”
This year’s Living Writers Series theme is “Home” — a concept Frazier explores with emotional nuance and powerful imagery.
“When I was small, home was unsafe and scary,” Frazier shared. “I recall running outside in a thunderstorm and scrambling up the swaying, spindly branches of a maple to where my father was too heavy to reach me. I’d let lightning sear me before I’d let him catch me again. Now, the tree is gone from that place, and so am I, and the dedication in my debut novel reads: To Adrian and Burgious—the two sunlit stories of the structure I call home. My work, too, attempts to pinpoint those tricky spots where a story begins and ends by mapping the many makeshift homes forged, inherited, traded, torn down or set on fire in between.”
Frazier’s debut novel "Off the Books" earned praise from The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus (starred review), Publishers Weekly and more. She publishes widely across genres, including poetry, screenwriting, creative nonfiction and short stories. Her next novel is forthcoming from Henry Holt & Co./Macmillan.
Frazier is the founder and editor-in-chief of Subnivean, SUNY Oswego’s undergraduate-staffed literary magazine, which was named a national finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award for Best Debut Magazine. Before joining Oswego’s faculty in 2019, Frazier lived and worked in California, where she served as a San Francisco Library Laureate and taught at several institutions, including the University of San Francisco and Oakland School for the Arts.
Living Writers Series events are made possible by ARTSwego and the Student Arts Fee, with additional support from campus partners. For more information on the series, visit the SUNY Oswego events calendar.
— Submitted by the Living Writers Series