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Visiting Writer Series

  • Academic Centers

Since its inception in 2008, the Saint Vincent College Visiting Writers Series has brought writers of merit to our campus in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. In addition to poets hailing from across the country, the series targets international writers in translation as well as writers from Western Pennsylvania. Past readers include Horacio Castellanos Moya, Ben Lerner, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Joy Katz, Rick Hilles and others.

  • Upcoming Readings

    Erín Moure
    Wednesday, March 18 at 7 p.m.
    Alphabet City Word Cellar, Event Cosponsored by City of Asylum, Pittsburgh

    Friday, March 20 at 5:30 p.m.
    The Westmoreland Museum of American Art

    Erín Moure is a poet and translator. In Canada, the USA, and the UK, she has published 18 books of poetry, a coauthored book of poetry, a volume of essays, a book of short articles on translation, a poetics, and two memoirs, and she is translator or co-translator of 19 books of poetry and two of creative non fiction (biopoetics) from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, and Spanish. Three of her own books have appeared in translation, one each in German, Galician, and French. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, A.M. Klein Prize twice, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize (twice for translations) and a two-time finalist for a Best Translated Book Award (USA-Poetry). A 40-year retrospective of her poetry, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press. Her translation into Frenglish from the Portuñol of Brazilian Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea appeared in 2017 from Nightboat Books. Her own latest is The Elements (Anansi, 2019), which she calls “a book of Dad.”


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    Stephanie Ford
    Monday, April 6 at 4 p.m.
    Fred Rogers Center 
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Stephanie Ford is the author of All Pilgrim (Four Way Books, 2015). Her poems have appeared in publications including Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, and Harvard Review. She received a BA in Studio Art from Grinnell College and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she now writes and works as a freelance editor in Pittsburgh.


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    Laura Cesarco Eglin
    Thursday, April 16 at 6 p.m.
    Fred Rogers Center 
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator. Most recently she has translated from the Portuñol Fabián Severo's Night in the North (Eulalia Books, 2020) with Jesse Lee Kercheval. Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst, (co•im•press), which won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. Her translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician have appeared in a variety of journals, including Timber, Exchanges, Modern Poetry in Translation, Eleven Eleven, The Massachusetts Review, Cordella Magazine, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and The Puritan. Cesarco Eglin is the author of five poetry collections, including Calling Water by Its Name (trans. Spanbauer; Mouthfeel Press), Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (The Lune), and Reborn in Ink (trans. Kercheval and Jagoe; The Word Works). She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books.

  • Ragan Poetry Contest

    The Ragan Poetry Contest was established in 1995 through a generous gift from Dr. James Ragan, a 1966 graduate of Saint Vincent College, who was the Director of the University of Southern California’s Graduate Professional Writing Program. The $250.00 cash award honors Dr. Ragan’s parents, John and Theresa Ragan, and is intended to encourage interest in poetry among Saint Vincent students.


    2014 Contest

    Our 2014 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Karen Dietrich. Dietrich grew up in the 1980s in a small factory town 57 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her first full-length book, THE GIRL FACTORY: A MEMOIR, (skirt/Globe Pequot) was published Oct. 1, 2013. She is the author of three chapbooks from small presses: Understory (dancing girl press, 2013), Girl Years (Matter Press, 2012) and Anchor Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2011).

    Dietrich lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She is an adjunct writing instructor at Westmoreland County Community College and the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She recently joined the faculty of the online creative writing MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

    Congratulations to our 2014 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

    • First Place: Chloe Wertz, “raise windows head home”
    • Second Place: Kathryn Ordiway, “Suppresible” 
    • Third Place: Tyler Friend, “The Printed Girl”

    2013 Contest

    Our 2013 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Carmen Giménez Smith. Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009)—and three poetry chapbooks—Reason’s Monsters (Dusie Kollectiv, 2011), Can We Talk Here (Belladonna Books, 2011) and Glitch (Dusie Kollectiv, 2009). She has also co-edited a fiction anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin, 2010). 

    She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press. She lives with her husband, the writer Evan Lavender-Smith, and their two children in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

    Links:

    A poem, “Dèjá Vu,” found on the Poetry Foundation

    Listen to Giménez Smith read a poem, “The Day Disco Died,” on NPR 

    Congratulations to our 2013 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

    • First Place: Kaitlyn Hlebechuk, “Wanting to Level the Scales”
    • Second Place: Brittany Banks, “Hail Holy Ovary” 
    • Third Place: Josh Flynn, “This Painting is about Falling In Love”

    2012 Contest

    Our 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Kevin Pilkington. Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind and Contemporary Poetry of New England

    His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including: Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review and others. A novel entitled Summer Shares is just out from Arche Books.

    Links:

    Selected Poetry from Valparaiso Poetry Review

    A poem posted on the Verse Daily 

    Congratulations to our 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

    • First Place: Angela Delfine, “You Live”
    • Second Place: Angela Gartner, “Red Stained Horse”
    • Third Place: Tucker Perkins, “Bacon”

    2011 Contest

    In 2011, Joy Katz served as the judge. Katz is the author of The Garden Room (Tupelo Press) and Fabulae (Southern Illinois University Press). She holds a B.S. in industrial design from The Ohio State University and an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Her awards include a 2011 NEA fellowship, a Stegner fellowship and the Nadya Aisenberg fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. 

    Her work is anthologized in The Best American Poetry; recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and at Chatham University and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and young son.

    LINKS:

    Selected Poetry from The Garden Room

    An Interview with Joy

    Essay on Robert Hass’s “The Nineteenth Century as a Song”

    Congratulations to our 2011 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

    • First Place: Jeremy Flynn, “On Trumpets, or Jazz”
    • Second Place: Sara Eidemiller, “Plums”
    • Third Place: Brittany Banks, “Smoke”
    • Honorable Mention: Kaitlyn Hlebechuk, “Market Me”

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    2010 Contest

    In 2010, the contest was judged by Sarah O’Brien. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Brien grew up on a small farm in Ohio and has lived in Cape Town, Paris, and various places in the United States. She is the translator of Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Heliotropes, and her book Catch Light was selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series. But not only is she a writer, she is also a fabulous cook and photographer

    Read Her Work

    Visit Her Bakeshop 

    Congratulations to our 2010 Ragan Poetry Contest Winners! 

    • First Place: Zach Tackett, “A Small, Monumental Bead”
    • Second Place: Megan Matich, “Catgut”
    • Third Place: Grettelyn Nypaver, “Cave-In”
    • Honorable Mention: Jillian Janflone, “Find It”

    Sarah O'Brien writes of Tackett's Poem:

    Both small & monumental

     “Make it new!” Ezra Pound exclaimed, and every student of poetry ever since (and long before for that matter) has been trying to do just that. It sounds easy. It isn’t. Only the good poets make it seem exceedingly simple. In “A small, monumental bead,” Zach Tackett seems to effortlessly guide us into his written world for a closer look. 

    As soon as I started to read this poem, I was taken in. I wanted to know where I was, suddenly surrounded by such sensuous description. The inside of a plant? The rough edge of a limb? Did I even care? Admittedly not really – I am happiest when a poem’s language is the first thing that intrigues. No phoneme here is left unconsidered, and the pull between such duos as small and monumental, blood and bone, amalgamate and whirlpools, and ash and collapse kept me returning for the reverberations. 

    Tackett knows the distance a little alliterative tension can take us toward feeling the poem from the inside, toward really getting into its skin. “A small, monumental bead” is about showing the world to be as strange and wonderful as it really is, about taking what might normally seem familiar and holding up to the glare. Is it really so usual? Is there really nothing to remark? No, resolutely no. In Tackett’s poem we are “surrounded in an ocean,” where “shadows are hooked / by accident.” This is a world I’d like to stay in. I can’t wait to see what else Tackett writes.

  • Friends of the Visiting Writers Series

    Ligonier Valley Writers

    The Ligonier Valley Writers is a nonprofit group serving writers and readers throughout western Pennsylvania.

    City of Asylum/Pittsburgh

    City of Asylum/Pittsburgh creates a thriving community for writers, readers and neighbors. We provide sanctuary to endangered literary writers, so that they can continue to write and their voices are not silenced. We offer a broad range of literary programs in a variety of community settings to encourage cross-cultural exchange. We anchor neighborhood economic development by transforming blighted properties into homes for these programs and energizing public spaces through public art with text-based components.

    Many of our international writers are affiliated with this organization and write for the organization’s magazine, Sampsonia Way.

    Generation Magazine

    Generation Magazine is Saint Vincent College’s student literary magazine. It is produced every fall by students taking a course in magazine production.

Past Readings

  • 2019

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    Joe O'Connor, C'65
    Wednesday, Dec. 4 at 6 p.m.
    Fred Rogers Center
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Joe O’Connor was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1941. Growing up his mother said, “his shoes were full of sand and his head full of cement – he couldn’t sit still and nothing could get in.” A lifetime has emptied the sand and cracked the cement. With retirement, Joe has taken up, with youthful enthusiasm, his lifelong project of letting as much light as possible get into and out of the crack in the cement.




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    Jeannine Pitas

    Thursday, Sept. 26 at 6:30 p.m.
    Fred Rogers Center
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Hailing from Buffalo, New York, Pitas is the author of three poetry chapbooks and the Spanish-English translator of several Latin American writers. Her translation of I Remember Nightfall by Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators' Association, and her translation of An Introduction to Octavio Paz by Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez was published by Mosaic Press in 2018. Her first full-length book of poetry, Things Seen and Unseen, was published by Quattro Books in May 2018. A graduate of University of Toronto's Centre for Comparative Literature, she teaches literature, writing, and Spanish at the University of Dubuque in Dubuque, Iowa.

     


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    Abigail Chabitnoy, C'09

    Wednesday, March 13 at 5 p.m.
    Luparello Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Chabitnoy is a poet of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She received her MFA at Colorado State University, where she was an associate editor for Colorado Review. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat Brut, Red Ink and Mud City.  Her first full length book of poetry, How to Dress a Fish, will be published in February of 2019 by Wesleyan University Press.


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    Maria Negroni

    Tuesday, April 23 - 5 p.m.
    Luparello Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    María Negroni (Argentina) has published seveal books of poetry: Islandia, El viaje de lanoche, Arte y Fuga, Cantar la nada, La Boca del Infierno, Interludio in Berlin, Exilium and Archivo Dickinson, among others; essays: Ciudad Gótica, Museo Negro, El testigo lúcido,Galería Fantástica, Pequeño Mundo Ilustrado and El arte del error, and two novels El sueño de Ursula and La Anunciación. Islandia, Night Journey, Andanza (The Tango Lyrics) and Mouth of Hell have appeared in English by Station Hill Press (2000), Princeton University Press (2002), Quattro Books (2013) and Action Books (2013) respectively. Her work has also been translated into Swedish, Portuguese, Italian and French.

    María Negroni received a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry in 1994, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1998, the Fundación Octavio Paz fellowship for poetry 2001 and The New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2005. She also received a National Book Award for her collection of poems El viaje de la noche, a PEN Award for Islandia as best book of poetry in translation, New York 2001, and the Siglo XXI International Prize for Non Fiction for her book Galería Fantástica. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College since 1999 and is now directing the first Creative Writing Program to exist in Argentina at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero.


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    Rachel Galvin

    Wednesday, May 1 at 5:30 p.m.
    Luparello Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her books of poetry include Elevated Threat Level (Green Lantern Press), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Alice James Books Kinereth Gensler Award, and Pulleys & Locomotion (Black Lawrence Press). She is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (Carcanet Press), which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation, and co-translator of Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo with Harris Feinsod (Open Letter Press). Her poems and translations appear in journals like The Boston Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Fence, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, PN Review,and Poetry. She is the author of a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford University Press), and is assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Galvin is a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective (www.outranspo.com).

  • 2018

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    Toi Derricotte

    Monday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.
    Luparello Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Toi Derricotte’s most recent book is The Undertaker’s Daughter. Her honors include the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, The New Yorker and Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996. She serves on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.


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    Meg Matich

    Wednesday, Feb. 21 at 5:30 p.m.
    Luparello Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Meg Matich is the unabashed founder of the Reykjavik (where she lives) Poetry Brothel. She received her MFA from Columbia University and her BA from SVC. She’s a translator of Icelandic and German-language literature, whose translations have appeared/are forthcoming in The Boston Review, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and others. Her first book, Cold Moons (Phoneme Media, 2017) by Magnús Sigurðsson, received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and is currently being turned into a choral symphony (English). Otherwise, she’s received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Comission, the DAAD, the Banff Centre, the Icelandic Literature Center, etc, and is optimistically at work on two thin anthologies of contemporary Icelandic poetry (fall 2018). She blogs Icelandic language and culture at Transparent Icelandic. 


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    Paula Bohince

    Monday, March 19 at 5 p.m.
    Luparello Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Swallows and Waves (Sarabande, 2016). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Granta, and elsewhere. Honors for her work include the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the “Discovery”/The Nation Award. She lives in Pennsylvania.

  • 2017

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    Nov. 13, 5 p.m.
    Katherine Hedeen
    Luparello Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Hedeen’s latest book-length translations include night badly written (Action Books), tasks (coimpress, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, shortlisted for the National Translation Award, 2017) by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Nothing Out of This World, an anthology of contemporary Cuban poetry (Smokestack, Winner, English PEN Award). She is the poetry translation editor for the Kenyon Review and a two-time recipient of NEA Translation Project Grant. She is a professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.


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    March 17, 5 p.m.
    Clare Beams
    Science Center Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    CLARE BEAMS lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, one of whom was just born in December. Her debut story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, was published by Lookout Books in October, and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize. Her fiction appears in One Story, Electric Literature, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and has received special mention in Best American Short Stories. A 2014 NEA fellow in prose, she teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.


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    Sheila Squillante

    Feb. 16, 5 p.m.
    Science Center Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    SHEILA SQUILLANTE is the author of the poetry collection, Beautiful Nerve (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015), and three chapbooks of poetry: In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens, 2014), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line, 2012) and A Woman Traces the Shoreline (Dancing Girl, 2011). She is also co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page (Sense Publishers, 2015). Recent work has appeared in places like North Dakota Quarterly, Indiana Review, Waxwing, Menacing Hedge and River Teeth. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University, where she edits The Fourth River, a journal of nature and place-based writing. From her dining room table, she edits the blog at Barrelhouse. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her husband, Paul Bilger, a philosopher and experimental photographer, and their children.


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    Lauren Shapiro

    Feb. 6, 5 p.m.
    Science Center Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    LAUREN SHAPIRO received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a former associate acquiring editor at the Yale University Press and has translated poetry from Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese and Arabic into English. Her poems have been published in such journals as Pool, Passages North, 32 Poems, Forklift, Ohio, Drunken Boat, notnostrums and Thermos. She is a curator of the Monsters of Poetry Reading Series and an assistant editor at Rescue Press. Her poetry book Easy Math was selected by Marie Howe for the 2011 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. Shapiro lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

  • 2016

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    Margo Orlando Littell

    Nov. 15, 5 p.m.
    Science Center Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Margo Orlando Littell grew up in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. She earned an MFA from Columbia and has spent the past fifteen years in New York City, Barcelona, Sacramento, and, now, northern New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Each Vagabond by Name is her first novel. The winner of the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize, Each Vagabond by Name is a piercing tale of isolation, redemption, and belonging.

    In regards to Littell’s new novel, Coal Hill Review notes that “ultimately, we’re left with a startling rediscovery of what love, loyalty, and redemption can look like for characters who appear to have little perspective of the future beyond their ordinary lives.” Mom Egg Review also praises Littell’s work, expressing how the author “examines the positive of integration. She contrasts our human desperation for the return of what we have lost with the opportunities we might gain if we were to entertain the new ideas that today’s migration brings.”


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    Valerie Mejer Caso

    Nov. 2, 5 p.m.
    Science Center Lecture Hall
    FREE and Open to the Public

    Painter and poet Valerie Mejer was born in Mexico City. Her poems explore containment and fragility, layering loss and possibility over a once-familiar landscape. She is the author of the poetry collections Rain of the Future (2013), translated by C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, and Alexandra Zelman; de la ola, el atajo (2009); Geografías de Niebla (2008); Esta Novela Azul (2004), which was translated by Michelle Gil-Montero as This Blue Novel (2013); and Ante el Ojo de Cíclope (1999). Her book De Elefante a Elefante (1997) won the Spanish Government’s “Gerardo Diego 1966” International Award. Her etchings appear in Raúl Zurita’s Los Boteros de la Noche (2010), and her paintings appear in Forrest Gander’s Ligaduras/Ligatures (2012) and in Antonio Prete’s Menhir (2007) and L’imperfection de la Lune(2007). Mejer is also the recipient of two CONACULTA grants as well as a grant from Sistema Estatal de Creadores for her translations of Australian poet Les Murray’s work.

    In regards to her recently translated This Blue Novel, Publishers Weekly expresses that “Mejer Caso demonstrates an extraordinary ability to balance obfuscation and clarity to render a mesmerizing, dynamic, layered collection that is both vertiginous and knowable.” Poet and translator Alex Niemi also praises the book in the way it “constructs itself around the instability of time in the measure of the dead, dependent on people and spaces rather than linearity to complete the picture of its haunting.” Commenting on an interview with the renowned writer, Ae Hee Lee noted that “Mejer’s poetry does more than address the subjects of homes, family linage, and identity— it revisits and reinvents memory. It is a poetic narrative of weaving loss and hope, past and future. One that surpasses ‘the logic of the world’.” 



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    Daniel Borzutzky

    Oct. 20, 5 p.m.
    Fred Rogers Center
    FREE & Open to the Public

    Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Daniel Borzutzky is a Chilean-American writer and translator living in Chicago. His books and chapbooks include, among others, The Performance of Becoming Human(2016), In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! (2015), Data Bodies(2013), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007). He has translated Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund.

    Poet Eileen Myles has described his work as “violent, perverse, and tender” in its portrayal of a “kaleidoscopic journey of American horror and global horror.” In the same respect, alluding to Borzutzky’s acclaimed writing, reviewer Amy Groshek notes that “his specialty is a manic, obsessive jargon peppered with legalisms, bureaucratic and corporate newspeak, and a positively twenty-first century fanaticism.” He is also celebrated by Carleen Tibbetts in American Microviews & Interviews, in which she comments, “Borzutzky manages to instill a hope in his readers that although we remain trapped in our putrid and failing bodies, we, too, will succeed in our spiritual mission to persevere.”

  • 2015

    Andy Stallings & Dan Rosenberg

    March 12, 2015, 5:30 p.m.
    Luparello Lecture Hall, Sis and Herman Dupre Science Pavilion

    Andy Stallings lives in Massachusetts, where he is faculty at Deerfield Academy. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an editor of THERMOS magazine, he is married to poet Melissa Dickey. They have three young children: Esme, Curran, and Galen. To the Heart of the World (Rescue Press, 2014) is his first book of poems.

    Dan Rosenberg is the author of i (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015). His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Rosenberg earned an MAF from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Georgia. He teaches literature and creative writing at Wells College and co-edits Transom.


     

    Karen Rigby

    March 16, 2015, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

    Karen Rigby was born in 1979 in Panama City, Panama. She is the author of Chinoiserie (2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, Ahsahta Press, 2012), which was named one of the best books of 2012 by The Volta in its Friday Feature and described as “a poignant, powerful and urgent debut” by Booklist

    Awarded a 2007 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council artist opportunity grant, she has been published in Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, Washington Square,  Field and New England Review. Her poetry is anthologized in The Arcadia Project, among others.

    Rigby is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews have appeared in magazines such as High Country News, ForeWord Reviews, Kirkus Reviews, Bookbrowse, Publishers Weekly and The Writer. She recently served as a poetry reader for the National Endowment for the Arts, and writes in Arizona.


     

    Wendy Miles

    March 30, 2015, 5:30 p.m.
    Fred M. Rogers Center

    Wendy Miles is the winner of the 2014 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award judged by poet Yona Harvey and finalist for the 2013 Perugia Press Prize, has published multi-genre work in places such as Arts & Letters, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. She lives in Lynchburg, Virginia and teaches creative writing at Lynchburg College and Randolph College.


     

    Joseph Massey

    April 13, 2015, 5:30 p.m.
    Fred M. Rogers Center

    Joseph Massey was born and raised outside of Philadelphia. He describes his work by saying: My work is not only a dialogue with the environment and how one registers it, it intimately banters with these influences.

    Today, Massey lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and is the author of To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2015), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), and Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), as well as a dozen chapbooks. His work has also appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Nation, American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015).

  • 2014

    Ossian Foley & Caryl Pagel   

    Sept. 29, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

    Ossian Foley is a poet and man of the sea. Of: Vol. I was published in 2013 by Ugly Duckling Presse. With Jim Longley, Ossian edits LVNG Magazine. Ossian lives in Cleveland with his dog, Satchel.

    Caryl Pagel is the author of Twice Told (H_NG M_N Books, 2014) and Experiments I Should Like Tried At My Own Death (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). She is the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press, a poetry editor at jubilat, and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.


     

    Ellen Smith    

    April 3, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

    Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her poems have appeared in CimarronBayouQuiddityNow CultureSententiaThe American Poetry ReviewCeriseThe SameKestrelOranges & SardinesDiner5 a.m.Oxford MagazineThe Prose PoemSouthern Poetry ReviewDescant (Canada) and others. Flash fiction published or forthcoming in KestrelWeaveSwitchbackThickjamThumbnailThe Shadyside ReviewWordgathering and Atticus Review.

    Her work has been recognized with an AROHO Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her chapbook, Scatter, Feed, will be published in the spring of 2014 by Seven Kitchens Press. She is an alumna of Seton Hill University. 

     Senior Sara Campbell read works from her senior project before Ellen’s reading.


     

     Karen Dietrich    

    March 25, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Fred M. Rogers Center

    Karen Dietrich grew up in the 1980s in a small factory town fifty-seven miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

    Her first full-length book, The Girl Factory: A Memoir, (skirt/Globe Pequot) was published in 2013. She is also the author of three chapbooks: Understory (dancing girl press, 2013), Girl Years (Matter Press, 2012) and Anchor Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2011).

    Dietrich lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She teaches writing at Westmoreland County Community College and the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She recently joined the faculty of the online creative writing MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

  • 2013

    Carmen Giménez Smith 

    March 26, 2013, 7 p.m., Sis and Herman Dupré Science Pavilion

    Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009)—and three poetry chapbooks—Reason’s Monsters (Dusie Kollectiv, 2011), Can We Talk Here (Belladonna Books, 2011) and Glitch (Dusie Kollectiv, 2009). 

    She has also co-edited a fiction anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin, 2010). She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press

    She lives with her husband, the writer Evan Lavender-Smith, and their two children in Las Cruces, New Mexico. (http://carmengimenezsmith.com)

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading 

  • 2012

    Eduardo Chirinos & Gary Racz   

    Oct. 22, 2012

    Eduardo Chirinos, an internationally acclaimed voice of Latin American letters, is professor of Modern and Classic Languages and Literatures at the University of Montana. A member of Peru’s 80’s Generation, which came of age after a decade of military dictatorship, Chirinos won the Premio Casa de América in 2001 for his volume Breve historia de la música [A Brief History of Music] and the Premio Generación del 27 in 2009 for Mientras el lobo está [While the Wolf is Around].

    Gary Racz, the translator of Eduardo Chirinos, is an associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Long Island University and at Rutgers University (the latter only during the summer). He presently serves as President of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and as a book review editor for Translation Review. A specialist in poetry translation, Racz has published many poems by Spanish and Latin American writers including Chirinos’ most recent publication, The Smoke of Distant Fires.

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading 


     

    Kevin Pilkington   

    March 26, 2012

    The 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest judge was Kevin Pilkington. Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). 

    His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind and Contemporary Poetry of New England. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including: Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review and others. A novel entitled Summer Shares is just out from Arche Books.

    The winners of the 2012 Ragan Poetry Contest also read their work at the reading.

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading  

  • 2011

    Horacio Castellanos Moya   

    Oct. 20, 2011

    Born in Honduras and raised in El Salvador, Horacio Castellanos Moya is the author of ten novels. He worked twelve years as a journalist in Mexico and has lived in Costa Rica, Canada, Guatemala, Spain and Germany (the latest under the auspices of the Frankfurt International Book Fair). 

     He became famous in 1997 with the publication of his novel El asco [“Revulsion”], because of which he was forced into exile. In 2007, he came to the United States as writer-in-residence of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, and he now teaches on the permanent faculty of The University of Iowa. His work has been translated into a dozen languages; four works have been translated into English, his most recent being Tyrant Memory.

    LINKS:

    An Article in the Pittsburgh City Paper about Senselessness

    Interview with City of Literature

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading  


    Joy Katz   

    April 11, 2011

    On Monday, April 11, 2011, the poet Joy Katz gave a reading with the Ragan Poets to packed room in the Fred Rogers Center. Interacting with her audience, Katz gave powerful insight into her writing style as well and answered questions from the audience while she read from her book The Garden Room as well as new poems. Katz also served as judge for the 2011 Ragan Contest.

    The picture below is from the reading. Many thanks to Maryann G. Eidemiller who provided us with some great photos of the event.  

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading  

  • 2010

    Khet Mar   

    Oct. 1, 2010

    Every fall, the Saint Vincent College Reading Series brings a distinguished writer to campus for a short visit. In 2010, Khet Mar, a native of Burma, was the Writer-in-Residence.

    Khet Mar was born in 1969. She is a journalist, novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Author of one novel, Wild Snowy Night, as well as several collections of short stories, essays and poems, her work has been translated into English and Japanese, been broadcast on radio and made into a film. In the fall of 2007, Mar was a visiting fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she is currently in residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which provides sanctuary to writers exiled under threat of death, imprisonment or persecution in their native countries (Pen World Voices).

    Her reading took place in the Fred Rogers Center at 7 p.m. on Oct. 21. Our events are free and open to the public.

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading

    View an Informational Video on Burma 


     

    Sarah O'Brien   

    April 23, 2010

    Every spring, the Saint Vincent College Reading Series invites a poet to judge the annual Ragan Poetry Contest and come to campus for a reading.

    This year’s judge was Sarah O’Brien. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Brien grew up on a small farm in Ohio and has lived in Cape Town, Paris and various places in the United States. She is the translator of Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Heliotropes, and her book Catch Light was selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series. But not only is she a writer, she is also a fabulous cook and photographer.

    O'Brien read poems from Catch Light. With her visual narrative, O’Brien threw us into pictures, catching our eyes and ears and allowing us to become part of her story.

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading 

  • 2009

    José Kozer   

    Sept. 24, 2009

    José Kozer is the preeminent Cuban poet of his generation and one of the most influential poets in Latin America, where his name is a household word among readers of poetry. He has published 51 books of poetry and two books of prose, and his work has been published in Mexico, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Chile. Dozens of articles and several books have been written about his work. He has been translated into English, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Italian and French.

    “It’s the humanity of the writing (passionate and comic by turns, and always precisely referential) that predicts its lasting greatness,” wrote poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg. “A resident of America and of the world, José Kozer is a poet who works at full throttle, gives us thereby what poetry has never done before and what it has always done.”

    Kozer was the first living Cuban Diaspora poet to have a book published in Cuba. He was born in Cuba in 1940, the son of Jewish parents who migrated in the late 1920s from Poland and Czechoslovakia. He left Cuba in 1960 and lived in New York until 1997 where he was a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and taught at Queens College for 32 years. Upon retiring, he moved to Spain and then to Florida, where he now resides.

    Listen to a Podcast of the Reading | Watch the Video of the Reading

    A Conversation with Cuban Poet Jose Kozer 


     

    Alex Lemon   

    Spring 2009

    Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner), the poetry collections Mosquito (Tin House Books), Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), Fancy Beasts (Milkweed Editions) and the chapbook At Last Unfolding Congo (horse less press). His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, BOMB, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House, among others. 

    He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation with Ray Gonzalez and frequently writes book reviews. A native of Iowa, Lemon lives in Fort Worth, Texas and teaches at Texas Christian University. (AlexLemon.com, Simon & Schuster)

  • 2008

    Rick Hilles   

    Fall 2008

    Rick Hilles, acclaimed poet and assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt, was named one of 10 recipients of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Awards given for “writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.” Author of the award-winning poetry collection Brother Salvage, Hilles received a $50,000 prize from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, based in New York.

    Brother Salvage won the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press) and was named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine. Hilles has been an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also received the Larry Levis Editor’s Prize in Poetry from the Missouri Review. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Salmagundi and Witness. (Vanderbilt Magazine)

     


     

    Nancy Reisman   

    Fall 2008

    Nancy Reisman is the author of House Fires, a short story collection that won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award as well as The First Desire, a novel set in her hometown of Buffalo, NY. Her work has appeared in, among other anthologies and journals, Best American Short Stories2001, Tin House, Glimmer Train and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her story “Tea” was included in the anthology The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005.

    House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture awarded The First Desire the 2005 Samuel Goldberg Jewish Fiction Award in June. The New York Times named The First Desire as a notable book of 2004.

    Reisman, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has taught at the University of Michigan, and she currently teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. (Random House, Vanderbilt University)


     

    Ben Lerner

    Spring 2008

    Ben Lerner, author of three collections of poetry, has been called by Publishers Weekly “among the most promising young poets now writing.” His debut volume, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon), was selected from more than 1000 manuscripts to win the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award; it was also named to the “Best Poetry Books of the Year” list by Library Journal and praised by The New York Times as a “funny, nervy volume.” His second book, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon), was a finalist for the National Book Award. It will appear in German translation from Luxbooks in the late spring of 2010. Copper Canyon published his third book, Mean Free Path, in early 2010.

    Originally from Topeka, Kansas, Lerner holds a B.A. in Political Theory and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Spain in 2003-2004. While at Brown he co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and his own poetry can be found in a variety of magazines, including Fence, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Slate and Verse, as well as in the anthologies: The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribners), The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry (Green Integer), New Voices (Northern Ireland, Irish Pages), and 12×12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa). He edits poetry for Critical Quarterly. Lerner has taught at the California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and joined the faculty of the MFA Program at Brooklyn College in 2010. (Copper Canyon Press, Brooklyn College)