Upcoming Events › Visiting Authors Series

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Mary-Frances Winters will be in conversation with Stephanie Paredes, Assistant Director, Multicultural Programs in the Division for Diversity & Inclusion at RIT.   Black people, young and old, are fatigued.  Experiencing inequities and even atrocities, day after day, is physically, mentally, and emotionally draining. And it is exhausting to constantly explain this to white people, even--and especially--well-meaning white people, who fall prey to white fragility and…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. "In her brilliant new chapbook, master microfictionist Sarah Freligh creates characters who are simultaneously tough and vulnerable, revealing the weird light found in sad, unsolvable situations.These are the most delicious microfiction truffles one can find here on planet Earth and I swallowed them whole." - Meg Pokrass, author of The Loss Detector and Co-Editor of Best Microfiction   “Sarah Freligh is one of the best poets practicing the…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Evocative and intimate, the linked poems in Familiars arise from questions and observations in the more than human world. In characteristically compact lyrics, Holly writes about trees, flowers, magic, touch, memory, erasure, power, and her grief over the changing climate. Familiars takes us on a three-part journey, with fresh observations of the natural world and our relationship to it.    Spaulding will be in conversation…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Originally from Pennsylvania, Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Alicia Hoffman lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, NY. She is the author of the full-length collections Railroad Phoenix (Kelsay Books, 2015) and Like Stardust in the Peat Moss (Aldrich Press, 2013). Her new book, Animal, is forthcoming from Futurecycle Press.    “Hoffman’s gorgeous poems deftly navigate the tightrope between grief and humor, and find their muscular, beating heart…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib’s second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019), won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Throughout, Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor’s dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility. His topics wrestle with…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. "...Kuusisto is writing at the height of his powers. But what does that mean? It means that the poet finds a lyric key to the word, and knows it. But how is it done, what is his secret? Perhaps it is his knowledge of "the pressure that makes each fact float." Old Horse, What Is to Be Done? is a beautiful, unrelenting, moving book. It…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Patrice Gopo grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, the child of Jamaican immigrants who had little experience being Black in America. From her white Sunday school classes as a child, to her early days of marriage in South Africa, to a new home in the American South with a husband from another land, Patrice’s life is a testament to the challenges and beauty of the world…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. “There is much in this sin-plagued world of ours; and, had we no flowers, I believe existence would be hard to be born.” So states a customer’s 1881 letter—one of thousands James Vick regularly received. Vick’s business, selling flower seeds through the mail from Rochester, NY, wasn’t unique, but it was wildly successful because he understood better than his rivals how to engage customers’ emotions.…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. A Lady’s Formula for Love is  Elizabeth Everett’s first novel, inspired by her admiration for rule breakers and belief in the power of love to change the world. She lives in upstate New York with her family near sites that figure prominently in the history of civil rights and women’s suffrage.   “ Fiercely feminist and intensely romantic, A Lady’s Formula for Love is a…