Pulitzer-Winning Poet Dennis To Launch

Hartwick’s New American Writing Festival

ONEONTA – Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Dennis will be the featured reader at Hartwick College’s two-evening New American Writing Festival Tuesday-Wednesday,Nov. 4-5, in the Shineman Chapel House’s Celebration Room.

Also featured will be the work of five Hartwick alumni: Diane Bliss ’81, Lynn Marie Houston ’94, Scot Slaby ’98, Jeffrey Simonds ’10, and Brendan Walsh ’10. The event is free, and open to the public.  Dennis will highlight the event, reading at 8 p.m. on Wednesday the 5th.

He has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Dennis holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at SUNY Buffalo since 1966.

He has published numerous books of poetry, including “House of My Own” (1974), “The Outskirts of Troy” (1988), “Meetings with Time” (1992), “Practical Gods” (2001; Pulitzer Prize), “Callings” (2010), and “Another Reason” (2013).

At 7 p.m. on Tuesday the 4th, the showcase reading features the Hartwick alumni. Bliss is professor of English at Orange County Community College, where she teaches college composition, early British literature, ethics, and a philosophy course in world religions. Her poems have been published in college literary magazines, Wordsmith, Yankee magazine, and limited edition chapbooks. She holds an MA in English from Binghamton University, a BA in creative writing, environmental concerns, and philosophy from Hartwick College, and an AAS in forest technology from the Ranger School of SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Wanakena, NY.

Houston has published essays and poems in South Atlantic Quarterly, MELUS, Postmodern Culture, Proteus, Poydras Review, Boston Literary Magazine, 3Elements Review, and others. She is the author of a book of beginning poetry exercises, The Poet’s Playground. After attending Arizona State University for her Ph.D. in American literature, she now teaches English at Orange County Community College.

Simonds received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in 2013. Since then, he has taught composition and creative writing courses at Hartwick College and Holyoke Community College, and has held writing workshops in Albany and East Greenbush, New York. He has written for digital literary magazines, nonprofit blogs, independently published short-story anthologies, school newspapers, and magazines. His short fiction has appeared in Pif Magazine and The Amateur Masters. In 2014, he published a short-story collection, You Are Not Allowed To Come Back After.

Slaby earned his MA in Writing (Poetry) from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he was named an Outstanding Graduate in 2009. His poems have appeared in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms, Unsplendid, “Verse Wisconsin,” and elsewhere in print and online. For the past 12 years, he has taught writing to high school and community college students in and near Frederick County, Maryland, where he lives with his wife and children.

Walsh was awarded a Fulbright Grant to teach English in Vientiane, Laos. He has also taught in South Korea and in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the assistant director of International Education at Southern Connecticut State University, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts. His work has been awarded the Anna Sonder Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, and a Freedman Prize for poetry in performance. His work has been published in the Connecticut Review, Off the Coast, Lines + Stars, Noctua Review, Drunk Monkeys, and other journals.

The New American Writing Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The reading is co-sponsored by Hartwick’s English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta, and the Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College.

For more information on the readings, contact Professor of English Robert Bensen at (607) 431-4902 or bensenr@hartwick.edu.