Living Writers Series
Beginning in Fall 2012 in conjunction with the ENGL 264 course, The Living Writers Series brings guest authors to the College to discuss their latest works. Students enrolled in the class read the books by the scheduled authors and then get to meet and engage these authors in a question and answer session followed by a public reading. The campus and the local communities are all invited to attend these extraordinary discussions.
The Living Writers Series is made possible with the generous support of the following organizations at SUNY Canton:
- Student Government Association
- Canton College Foundation
- Office of the President
- Office of the Provost
- School of Business and Liberal Arts
- Department of English and Humanities
- Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center
- Hospice of St. Lawrence Valley
- National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
Upcoming Speakers
Christopher Brunt
Monday, November 4 - 12:00 p.m.
Woodcock Conference Suites
Christopher Brunt is the author of the poetry collection WAR AT HOME, published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. His poetry, fiction, and essays have been featured in Ploughshares, The Nation, Oxford American, Fugue, Meridian, Copper Nickel, the Cincinnati Review, and other magazines.
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
Thursday, September 26 - 6:30 p.m.
Payson 219
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s debut novel, Off the Books, earned positive reviews from The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Bustle, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and others, and was included in Bustle's "Most Anticipated" roundup.
Past Speakers
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has an MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Guernica, Printer’s Row, and The Breakwater Review, where ZZ Packer awarded him the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Nation, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, The Guardian, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Review, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. His second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, will be published by Graywolf in 2021.
Mateo Askaripour
Mateo Askaripour's debut novel, BLACK BUCK was released in January 2021. His writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Entrepreneur, The Rumpus, Catapult, Medium, and more. Askaripour was also a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer-in-residence.
Chanelle Benz
Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta.com, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence and The Cupboard, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her novel The Gone Dead was published by Ecco Press in June 2019. She currently lives in Memphis where she teaches at Rhodes College.
Chase Berggrun
Chase Berggrun is a trans woman poet and the author of R E D (Birds LLC, 2018). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Poetry Magazine, jubilat, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Sheri Booker
Sheri J. Booker is an award winning author, educator, and poet. She is the author of Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She spent nine-years working at a funeral home in Baltimore.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of the memoir She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, the winning, utterly surprising story of a person changing genders, and one of the first bestselling works by a transgender American. Until 2001, she published under the name James Boylan. Today, she is an activist for LGBT people, and transgender men and women in particular, through her writing and her involvement on the Board of Directors of GLAAD and the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
Theresa Brown
Theresa Brown, BSN, RN, works as a clinical nurse in Pittsburgh. Her most recent book is The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives. Theresa received her BSN from the University of Pittsburgh, and during what she calls her past life, a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. Her column "Bedside" appeared on the New York Times op-ed page as well as on the Times blog “Opinionator” and she is a frequent contributor to the New York Times.
Luis Clemente
With a swift bat and fierce athleticism, Roberto Clemente intimidated major league pitchers for eighteen seasons, compiling three thousand hits. But what Clemente did off the field made him an equally great humanitarian. Luis Clemente and family share a side of the baseball great previously unseen.
Erica Dawson
Erica Dawson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Small Blades Hurt and Big-Eyed Afraid. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, Literary Imagination, Unsplendid, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her reviews have been featured in Florida Review, and she currently writes a freelance column, “Dark and Sinful,” for Creative Loafing Tampa.
Siobhan Fallon
Siobhan Fallon is the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone, which was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle, Self Magazine, Los Angeles Public Library, Janet Maslin of The New York Times, and won a 2012 Indies Choice Honor Award, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for First Fiction, and the 2012 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Fiction.
Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, WHIP SMART (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, ABANDON ME (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a Best Book of 2017. Her second essay collection, GIRLHOOD, a national bestseller, was published by Bloomsbury on March 30. A craft book, BODY WORK, was published by Catapult in 2022.
Chris Fink
Chris Fink is the author of two short story collections, Farmer’s Almanac: A Work of Fiction (2013) and Add This to the List of Things That You Are (2019). He is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Beloit College and editor-in-chief of the Beloit Fiction Journal.
Arthur Flowers
Arthur Flowers is a novelist, essayist, and performance poet. A native of Memphis Tennessee, he is the author of novels, Another Good Loving Blues and De Mojo Blues; a children’s book, Cleveland Lee’s Beale Street Band, and a memoir/manifesto, Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman and a graphic nonfiction, I See The Promise Land. He has published shorts and articles and is a bluesbased performance poet. His latest children's book, Brer Rabbit retold, originally oral tales told by slaves from the American South, connects the spoken and written word in surprising ways.
Jennifer Foerster
Jennifer Elise Foerster, the author of Leaving Tulsa, received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts (July 2007) and her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2003). Of German, Dutch, and Muscogee descent, she is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma.
Santee Frazier
A member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Santee Frazier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His collection of poems, Dark Thirty, was published in the Sun Tracks series of the University of Arizona Press.
Keely Hutton
Keely Hutton is a former 8th grade English teacher and recipient of the Highlights Foundation Writers Workshop scholarship at Chautauqua. Since 2012, she has been working closely with Ricky Richard Anywar to tell his story. Soldier Boy is her first novel. Ricky Richard Anywar is the founder of the internationally acclaimed charity Friends of Orphans, and a former child soldier in Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Since escaping the LRA, Anywar has dedicated his life to rehabilitating other survivors and advocating for peace in their communities.
Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison was born in Washington DC and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she's lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and (currently) Brooklyn. Leslie has worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. Every one of these was a world; they're still in her. These days Leslie teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration. Leslie's new book, a collection of essays called Make It Scream, Make It Burn, was released in September 2019
Mary Karr
Mary Karr is most widely known for her best-selling memoirs, but regards herself primarily as a poet. She's a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, and has written four volumes of verse, including "Sinners Welcome." Her most popular book to date is The Liar's Club, which remained on the New York Times Best Seller's List for more than a year. She came to SUNY Canton in 2012 to discuss her autobiography, Lit: A Memoir. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous—that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to.
Christopher Kennedy
Christopher Kennedy is the author of three poetry collections: Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death, which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2007; Trouble with the Machine; and Nietzsche's Horse. A fourth collection, Ennui Prophet, was published by BOA Editions in 2011.
Robert Kugler
Rob Kugler, is the author of A Dog Named Beautiful, named Forbes’ “Best Travel Books for the Summer” 2020. Rob, raised by a single mother along with his 3 siblings, followed his older brother Mike’s footsteps and joined the Marines at the age of 17 in the year 2000. In 2007, while both serving in Iraq, Mike was killed by an improvised explosive device.
Patrick Lawler
Patrick Lawler has published three collections of poetry: A Drowning Man is Never Tall Enough (University of Georgia Press, 1990); reading a burning book (Basfal Books, 1994); and Feeding the Fear of the Earth, winner of the Many Mountains Moving poetry book competition (2006). In addition, he has received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, two grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and an award from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.
Adam Levin
Adam Levin is most noted for his dark and witty short work. Some reviewers have compared his writing to that of late literary great David Foster Wallace. Levin's latest work Hot Pink is a collection of short stories.
Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems, five books of essays and a book of stories, Apparition & Late Fictions. The Undertaking won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He is founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement. The Boston Globe said he was "probably America's most important environmentalist."
Rahul Mehta
Rahul Mehta’s debut short story collection, Quarantine, won a Lambda Literary Award and the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Sun, New Stories from the South, the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, Elle India, and elsewhere. His debut novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2016.
Jeff Parker
Jeff Parker is the author of several books including Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal, the novel Ovenman, and the short story collection The Taste of Penny. He is the Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, and he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Jennifer Pashley
Jennifer Pashley is the author of two collections of stories: States was called "an inviting and well carved debut" by Aimee Bender. About The Conjurer, Tina May Hall says, "Pashley is a hard luck oracle, tracing portents in a world heavy with the weight of not-quite babies, truck-stop infidelities, the ghosts of June Carter and Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor."
Joy Priest
Joy Priest was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethwey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review.
Iain Haley Pollock
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of two poetry collections, Ghost, Like a Place and Spit Back a Boy, which won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Baffler, and The New York Times Magazine. Pollock teaches English at Rye Country Day School in Rye, NY, and is a member of the poetry faculty at the Solstice MFA program of Pine Manor College. He also serves as poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine.
Danny Ramadan
Ahmad Danny Ramadan is an award-winning Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker and LGBTQ-refugees activist. Since his arrival to Canada as a refugee, Ramadan published his award-winning debut novel, The Clothesline Swing. He is currently working on his next novel, The Foghorn Echoes, and a collection of short fiction, The Syrian Survival Notebook. His children book, Salma the Syrian Chef, published by Annick Press, is to be released in 2020.
Anywar Ricky Richard
Anywar Ricky Richard was abducted at age 14 to serve as a child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an experience that included witnessing the horrors of torture, rape, and the murder of his parents. Since escaping the LRA, Anywar has dedicated his life to rehabilitating other survivors and advocating for peace in their communities.
William Rhoden
Award-winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves and Third and A Mile: The Trials and Triumphs of The Black Quarterback, William C. Rhoden uses sports as a vehicle to understand an increasingly complex society.
George Saunders
George Saunders is the author of six previous books, including the story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded the Pen/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and was included in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.
Doug Smith
Doug Smith is a New York comic who has appeared on CONAN, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Kevin Hart’s LOL Network, and This Is Not Happening on Comedy Central. He also starred in the Comedy Central mini-mock “Brooklyn Ball Barbers”, which has since become their most-viewed-video of all time.
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction and selected as a Notable Book by the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as three books of poetry. Her most recent collection of poems, Life on Mars, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book.
Daniel Torday
Daniel Torday's fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in Esquire Magazine, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories, the Harvard Review and the Kenyon Review. The Sensualist, winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Awards' Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction, tells the tale of 17-year-old Samuel Gerson, who is ready to rid himself of the tight-knit Jewish community in which he's spent his whole life.
David Treuer
David Treuer is an American writer, critic and academic. As of 2012 he had published four novels; his work published in 2006 was noted as among the best of the year by several major publications. He published a book of essays in 2006 on Native American fiction that stirred controversy by criticizing major writers of the tradition and concluding, "Native American fiction does not exist.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals.
Tyrone Williams
Poet Tyrone Williams was born in Detroit, Michigan and earned his BA, MA, and PhD at Wayne State University. He is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Convalescence (1987); Futures, Elections (2004); Musique Noir (2006); and Pink Tie (2011), among others. His full-length collections of poetry include c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), and Howell (2011).