Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life: heartbreaking […]
In Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger, veteran journalist Justin Murphy makes the compelling argument that the educational disparities in Rochester, NY, are the result of historical and present-day racial segregation. Education reform alone will never be the full solution; to resolve racial inequity, cities such as Rochester must first dismantle segregation. Drawing on […]
The poems in Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud form an allegorical travelog chronicling two brothers’ mutual descent into hell. When the older brother runs off, the younger brother begins roaming Hell’s different landscapes in search of him. Pearson leads his speakers on a speculative, epistolary journey through the nether realm. “Pearson is […]
We live to create at Write On. The heart of this class is the weekly workshop of student writing, moderated so that each writer feels encouraged and supported by the others, while also receiving constructive suggestions for growth. Short lessons connect current student work to relevant published writing, classical literary structures, and mechanics. Classes include […]
Bill Wynne is a first-time author and greater Rochester-based white antiracist activist. The experiential insights in his memoir Understanding and Combating Racism: My Path from Oblivious American to Evolving Activist are premised on the human networks and friendships he developed during his business career and in subsequent work in the nonprofit sector. Understanding and Combating […]
Virtual Event led by Sally Bittner Bonn. Telling our stories is how we make sense of our lives, how we hold memories, how we celebrate, how we grieve, how we wrestle with what we don’t understand. Mothering is complex; it can be simultaneously exhausting, exhilarating, lonely, hysterically funny, maddening, bursting with love. We’ll examine some […]
Moving between Cuba and the U.S., the stories in Are We Ever Our Own trace the paths of the women of the far-flung Armando Castell family. Related but unknown to each other, these women are exiles, immigrants, artists, outsiders, all in search of a sense of self and belonging. Linked by theme and complex familial […]
Using flight as a metaphor, Sarah Collins’ debut poetry collection, Recovery From Unusual Attitudes, details her personal journey with serious mental illness and radical conversion to Christianity. From pain to purpose, fear to freedom, hatred of God to healing by His grace, Recovery From Unusual Attitudes is a raw story of redemptive hope. Sarah Collins […]
In her luminous debut, Gayatri Sethi deftly interweaves verse, memoir, and a bold call to action as she recounts her experience searching for home in the diaspora. Drawing upon her life story as a Tanzanian-born-Punjabi turned American educator and mother of biracial children, Sethi tells an intimate tale of stepping into her power while confronting […]
David Mihalyov will be in conversation with Alison Meyers. “What I admire in Maxine Kumin’s poems I find in abundance in David Mihalyov's A Safe Distance: an intimate observance of seemingly ordinary things rendered into arresting lyrics. “Burrow deeper” beneath suburban routines we may assume we know or dismiss outright, these are instructive poems of […]
Join us in raising money to provide humanitarian aid and medical relief to injured Ukrainians. Listen in as local poets read selections from Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of emerging and established Ukrainian voices charting what it means to be in a state of war and how it affects the poetics […]
