VOICES, Pitt-Greensburg’s reading series celebrating the beauty and diversity of America’s literary landscape, will bring West Coast authors Clint Margrave and Alexis Fancher together with student authors from the University’s Creative & Professional Writing Program for its first reading of the 2021-2022 season. This virtual event will be held Thursday, Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. EST. The event is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. Please register here: [link closed]. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the reading.
Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, The American Journal of Poetry, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She’s authored six poetry collections, most recently Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press, 2019). EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQ Books) dropped in March 2021. Coming in 2022, her seventh collection, Stiletto Killer (in Italian) from Edizioni Ensemble, Italia; BRAZEN, Alexis’s next, full-length erotic book, again by NYQ Books; and DUETS, an illustrated, ekphrastic chapbook collaboration with poet Cynthia Atkins, to be published by Harbor Editions. Ms. Fancher’s photographs are featured worldwide, including the covers of Witness, Pithead Chapel, Heyday, Nerve Cowboy, The Chiron Review, Spillway, and The Pedestal Magazine. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is poetry editor of LA Cultural Daily.
Clint Margrave is the author of the novel Lying Bastard (Run Amok Books, 2020), and the poetry collections, Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor (Forthcoming) all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, and The Moth, among others. He lives in Long Beach, CA.
Lori Jakiela, professor of English and director of the Creative and Professional Writing Program, and Dave Newman, visiting teaching-writer at Pitt-Greensburg, co-direct the series.
“Both Alexis and Clint write from the lively and outrageous tradition of California writers like Gerald Locklin and Charles Bukowski, and bring that rawness into the 21st century,” Newman said. “They are the embodiment of how writing can speak to our contemporary lives and experiences.”
Jakiela credits pandemic technology for opening the world to the campus literary community and beyond.
“That technology has allowed us to bring together writers like Alexis and Clint, writers from all corners of the United States and beyond, and share these vibrant, vital voices with a wide audience and with our student-writers,” Jakiela said. “This is something that we, as a small undergraduate writing program with limited funding, wouldn't be able to do otherwise. It's such a gift for our students and our entire literary community to have these writers virtually with us each month."
Building on the campus’s long-running Written/Spoken Series, Voices showcases Pitt-Greensburg's focus on experiential learning by bringing together undergraduate student-writers with award-winning authors.
“One unique thing about the Voices series is that it pairs student authors with our visiting writers,” Jakiela said. “Our writing majors complete and publish chapbook-length collections before they graduate. This experience, along with experiences like the Voices series, prepares our student-authors to find their own place in the literary world.”
The readings are funded in part by the Pitt-Greensburg Office of Student Life, the Academic Village, and the Office of Academic Affairs.
For more information about the Creative & Professional Writing Program at Pitt-Greensburg, please visit the campus website (https://www.greensburg.pitt.edu) or contact Jakiela at loj@pitt.edu.