Readings for the Fall 2021 Creative Writers Reading Series will take place via Zoom.
All readings begin at 6:00 p.m.
The Creative Writers Reading Series is produced by Penn State Behrend’s B.F.A. in Creative Writing degree program with support from the Clarence A. and Eugenie Baumann Smith Fund.
For additional information, visit us on Facebook at Penn State Behrend - BFA Creative Writing.
Fall 2021 Readings
Smith Creative Writers Reading Series
September 2 – Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels Parakeet (NY Times Editors' Choice), 2 a.m. at The Cat's Pajamas (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection Safe as Houses (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has received The O. Henry Prize and The Pushcart Prize, and in 2017 she was the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She teaches in the MFA programs at NYU and The New School. Her fourth book, the novel Beautyland, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
September 9 – Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel is the author of five collections of stories, most recently Sing to It, published in 2019. Her Collected Stories was published in 2006. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an inaugural United States Artists Foundation Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Prize for Fiction, the REA Award, the Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many more. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She has taught fiction writing at Harvard, Bennington, NYU, and many other colleges and universities, and currently teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
September 16 – Frank Paino
Frank Paino was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and earned an M.F.A. from Vermont College. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including: Crab Orchard Review, Catamaran, North American Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Lake Effect, The Face of Poetry, Poets for Life, and Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight. His first two volumes of poetry, The Rapture of Matter and Out of Eden, were published by Cleveland State University Press. His third book, Obscura, was published by Orison Books in 2020. He has received The Pushcart Prize, The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, and a 2016 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.
Lake Effect Contributors’ Reading
October 21 – Caroline Chavatel and Audrey Gradzewicz
Caroline Chavatel is the author of White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), which won The Laurel Review’s 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. In addition to Lake Effect, her work has appeared in AGNI, Sixth Finch, Foundry, Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is co-founding editor of The Shore, an editor at Madhouse Press, and is currently a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University, where she is Poetry Editor of New South.
Audrey Gradzewicz was born in Buffalo, New York, and once accidentally joined an alien cult. She blames Steinbeck. She has an M.F.A. from Purdue University. In addition to Lake Effect, her poems appear in Thrush, Mid-American Review, Guernica, Muzzle, Smartish Pace, and DIAGRAM, among others.