Spring 2023 Schedule

Feb. 15, 2023, 7:30 p.m. | Fannie Barrier Williams Building, McCue Auditorium

Writers Forum Presents: Sarah Cedeño

Sarah Cedeño teaches writing at SUNY Brockport and is author of Not Something We Discuss Often, a collection of essays.

In prose that has been called “both beautiful and brave,” Sarah Cedeño “refuses to look away from the hard and inevitable truth and in doing so, she offers up instruction on how to live” (Sarah Freligh). Her debut collection of essays, Not Something We Discuss Often, was published in 2022. Her work has appeared in journals including Brevity, The Journal, 2 Bridges, The Pinch, The Baltimore Review, The Rumpus, Hippocampus Magazine, and Bellevue Literary Review. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and lives in Brockport, New York, where she teaches writing at SUNY Brockport. Her web site is www.sarahmcedeno.com.

March 1, 2023, 7:30 p.m. | Fannie Barrier Williams Building, McCue Auditorium

Writers Forum Presents: Wendy Miles

Wendy Miles’s 2022 Float is “a remarkable debut collection filled with vital, visceral imagery and fully formed within the fractured and yet unclouded syntax of remembrance” (Jon Pineda). Miles has published work in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Hunger Mountain. The title poem of Float was selected by Yona Harvey as the winner of the 2014 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University and lives in Lynchburg, Virginia. She is currently at work on another collection, titled Plump for Prey.

March 22, 2023, 7:30 p.m. | Fannie Barrier Williams Building, McCue Auditorium

Writers Forum Presents: DeMisty D. Bellinger

Ploughshares calls DeMisty D. Bellinger’s debut novel, New to Liberty, “stunning”; John Copenhaver writes, “with vibrant and restrained prose, Bellinger has achieved the seemingly impossible: written an American epic in under two hundred pages.” Bellinger has published two volumes of poetry, Peculiar Heritage and Rubbing Elbows. She is a poetry editor at Malarkey Books, an alumni reader at Prairie Schooner, and a professor at Fitchburg State University. She holds an MFA from Southampton College and a PhD from the University of Nebraska, and she is an alum of Bread Loaf and Marge Piercy’s Intensive Writing Workshop. She lives in Massachusetts.

April 5, 2023, 7:30 p.m. | Edwards 106

Writers Forum Presents: Ravi Mangla

Rion Amilcar Scott writes that The Observant–Ravi Mangla’s “short and powerful” second novel–“begs to be read in one sitting, but I read it slowly, piece-by-piece, marveling at the book’s layered and emotional turns. It really is a masterful work.” The Observant was published in 2022; Mangla is also the author of the 2013 novel Understudies, which Joanna Scott called “Funny, moving, perceptive, artful.” His stories and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature, The Paris Review Daily, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Rochester, New York.

April 26, 2023, 7:30 p.m. | Brockport Downtown REOC, 161 Chestnut Street, Rochester

Writers Forum Presents: The Art of Fact: Steve Majors

Steve Majors is the author of High Yella: A Modern Family Memoir. Kirkus Reviews called it “A brave reckoning with multiple questions of identity, class, family, race, and other thorny issues.” Majors grew up in rural Western New York, the youngest of five kids raised by a single mother. His work is influenced by his experiences as a white appearing, mixed-race child in an all Black family as well as his life as a gay man raising two Black daughters in an interracial, interfaith family. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC Think, Huffington Post and Medium.

Please join us in person or livestream the event on YouTube