2025 Zoom events will be loaded soon. (These are 2024)

Four authors (a journalist, two poets, and an essayist) discuss the impact of Rome, Italy, on their lives, imagination, and writing and share excerpts from their work. Animated slides of the city will accompany their presentations, followed by a question-and-answer session. With Anthony Di Renzo, Barbara Adams, Eric Machan Howd and Katharyn Howd Machan.

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Current members of the Cayuga Writers group will describe who they are, what they do and why, how the group works and —most importantly—how it helps their writing. Members of the group will read a short example of work, describe the range of feedback the piece received–from grammatical nuts and bolts to questions about audience, from plot revisions to just plain empathy. We’ll review the nuts and bolts of how we made sense of this critical commentary and then share the revised piece. The audience will be invited to share first hand in the writer’s process, from first draft to receiving spoken and written critical commentary, to digesting and making sense of the feedback, and finally, to successfully incorporating it into the creative process. The audience will see the value of the group’s commentary. With Judith Pratt, Felicia Ansty, Persephone Doliner, Kathy Morris, and Barbara Schramm.

With Heather Bartlett (poems from her collection, “Another Word for Hunger”), Rabbi Suzanne Brody (poetry), Sue Mann (except from her debut historical fiction novel), Roselyn Teukolsky (excerpt from her thriller “A Reluctant Spy”), and Karel Hilversum (poems about life, love, and society)

Five local authors (Keegan Young, Naomi Daniluk, Devin Hunt, Cheyenne Shaffer and Kyle Thompson) will read excerpts from their self-published anthology. Beware the Light: An Anthology of Dark Fiction is a local anthology of five cautionary tales against things that lurk in the light. Monsters among us, light junkies, the fountain of youth, demons, God himself, reminding us that not all that glitters in the light is gold. Q&A will follow.

“Polychromatic Voices: Translation in Performance” is the prologue to the multilingual theatre of the same title which will open at Binghamton University in Fall 2024. The source text/show script is Yangzhou Bian’s poem cycle “Yorick”, composed as a response to the presentation of blackness and whiteness in the arts. The source text co-exists in English and Mandarin. The 15 translations of the 14 chapters in Sinhalese, Arabic, Japanese, Ukrainian, Malayalam, Spanish, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Italian, French, Greek, Russian, Ganian, and Ancient Chinese embody an alternative proposal to the overemphasis on race and racial identity through the journey with Yorick, the beloved skull from Shakespearean classics, and the Raven, the abused token and slighted reminder of biases. The author of the poem cycle and some of the presenters will be sharing the project, process, selected chapters from the original, and their translations. We hope to bring the audience a glimpse of the various cultures through art and conversation. With Yangzhou (Yao) Bian, Batool Alghamdim, Jionghao Liu, Sula Mahagam and Itzel Robles.

Are you a writer, passionate about sharing your work? Does your work explore a message you want to share? Or are you simply a book lover and would like to learn more about using art through different mediums like writing and expression?  “Existing Beyond The Pen” is a thematic group reading that will highlight local authors and provide an opportunity for writers to explore their perspectives as it relates to their artwork. Our themes are preservation, resilience and empowerment. This thematic group reading features authors who will share their literary pieces discussing self help and navigating AND optimizing one’s experiences through their art. With KP The Intellectual, Candy, and Bubblesz.

With Lee Cotman (poetry about finding divinity in human connection), Yangzhou (Yao) Bian (Bananaland, a postmodern satire in one-act), Mary Brett Lorson (a selection of villanelles about the past, present, and future), Gregg Weatherby (poems featuring local images from his books), and Mark Zuss (poems and images of freedom and Spring).

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How do you tell someone’s story? What is it like to hear your story told by another? How do you turn a long recorded interview into a short, compelling audio piece? We will discuss those questions and more as we hear stories from our community created by students in Cornell’s Milstein Program in Technology & Humanity. The students crafted these pieces as part of a class taught by Milstein Program Director Austin Bunn, a filmmaker, writer, and theater artist. Lesley Greene and Jonathan Miller, co-directors of Story House Ithaca, helped connect the students to community groups and advised them as they prepared and crafted their stories. The students interviewed English language learners from Open Doors English, participants in Civic Ensemble’s ReEntry Theater, and members of Lifelong Senior Center. We will hear a sampling of these audio stories, with time for discussion of each. Austin, Lesley, Jonathan, Milstein students, members of the three community groups, and you, the audience, will take part!

This bi-lingual two-voice reading with Erin Riddle and Juliana Torres Forero will be the product of a collaborative translation from Spanish to English of some of Bogotana poet Emilia Ayarza’s most portentous poems. The reading will be preceded by some reflections on the context in which Ayarza wrote, the particular traits of her work, and its relevance to the past and present. Ayarza was a poet ahead of her time and named the realities of the most vulnerable and silenced humans and other living beings of her society: women of diverse races, the proletarian class, children, people with physical disabilities, queer individuals, and nature. Immersed in a social, cultural, and political landscape marked by violence and social and gender inequalities, the irreverent nature of her poems appears as oxygen in times of oppression and uncertainty. Our reading seeks to embody Ayarza’s poetry, to bring it to the present, and, in a performative way, to emulate the monstrous force of her voice.