Category: Reading Series

Bennington Writers – New Books

Monday, May 19th  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Tonight, four writers with recent books to their credit will read – Ruth Crocker, Anna Evans, Robert Moulthrop, and Jo Pitkin.

Ruth W. Crocker’s essays and other nonfiction writing have been recognized in Best American Essays and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of several magazine and journal articles that have been featured in The Gettyburg Review, Grace Magazine, 0-Dark-Thirty, T.A.P.S. Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post. She graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in the winter of 2011. Crocker’s memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After Warwill be published in 2014. She lives in Mystic, Connecticut and, on the web, can be contacted at www.ruthwcrocker.com.

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink

Bennington Writers – New Books

Monday, April 28th  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Join Mark Wunderlich, tonight’s featured writer, and two readers also with recently published works, Hayden Saunier and Jaime Clarke, as well as Nashville’s fine poet, TJ Jarrett.

Mark Wunderlich’s first book of poetry, The Anchorage, published in 1999, received the Lambda Literary Award. His second volume, Voluntary Servitude, was published by Graywolf Press in 2004. A third, titled The Earth Avails, is recently available from Graywolf. He has published individual poems in The Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Wunderlich has taught in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs at many institutions. Since 2003, he has served on the faculty at Bennington College. In 2012 Wunderlich was named the Director of Poetry at the college, organizing on-campus readings, lectures, and short residencies by prominent American and international poets. In addition, he teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. Home is in New York’s Hudson Valley, near the village of Catskill.

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink

Bennington Writers – An Evening with Welcome Table Press

Wednesday, April 2nd  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Join Kim Dana Kupperman, founding editor of Welcome Table Press,  for a prose reading featuring friends of the press: Robert Atwan, Dustin Beall Smith, and Suzanne Menghraj.

Welcome Table Press was founded in 2002 in her downeast Maine kitchen. Originally serving as a vehicle for Food For Thought, a miniature, hand-sewn periodical featuring lyric essays of 1,500 words or less, original art, and a recipe for a local, seasonal dish, the Press has expanded its vision, dedicating itself to publishing and celebrating the essay in all its forms. Its first volume, You. An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person, was edited by Kupperman and published in February 2013.

Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of a critically acclaimed collection of essays, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (Graywolf, 2010), which received the 2009 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Among her many accomplishments, are notable mentions in the Pushcart Prize anthology (2007; 2010) and Best American Essays (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013).

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink

Bennington Writers – Nonfiction

Monday, February 17th  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Susan Cheever will be tonight’s featured reader. Joining her are Liz Arnold, Mary Beth Kelly, and Christine Simek.

Susan Cheever’s books include My Name Is Bill – Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous; Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever; Note Found in a Bottle, a memoir of her own alcoholism and recovery; Treetops: A Memoir; and five novels: Looking for Work, A Handsome Man, The Cage, Doctors and Women, and Elizabeth Cole. Her essay ‘Baby Battle,’ in which she describes immersion in early motherhood and subsequent phases of letting go of her primary identity as a mother, was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars, edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner.

Cheever is the author of American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, published in December 2006. In addition to working on her books, she teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program and at The New School.

e. e. cummings: A Life, her latest book, will be published by Pantheon on February 11, 2014.

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink

Bennington Writers – Fiction

Monday, January 27th  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Martha Cooley will be tonight’s featured reader. Joining her will be Karen Uhlmann, Lisa Alexander, and Valerie Ellis.

Martha Cooley is a novelist and author of short fiction, essays, and poetry whose work has appeared in leading literary journals. Her first novel, The Archivist, was a bestseller published in a dozen foreign markets, and her second, Thirty-Three Swoons, has been published in Italian. Martha translates prose and poetry from the Italian and has taught numerous workshops and seminars in Italy. An Associate Professor of English at Adelphi University, she also serves on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is an active member of PEN American Center and a contributing editor for several literary magazines.

V. Hansmann, host

Initial drink, $8

Bennington Writers – Poetry

Monday, December 30th  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Christopher Salerno will be tonight’s featured reader. Joining him will be Charlie Gadol, Sarah Phillips, and Shevaun Brannigan.                 

Christopher Salerno’s books of poems include ATM, selected by D.A. Powell for the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize (to be published in 2014), Minimum Heroic, (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, 2010), and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). His chapbook, Automatic Teller won the Laurel Review Midwest Chapbook Prize and will be published in the fall of 2013. Another chapbook, AORTA, is out from Poor Claudia. His poems have appeared in Fence, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, American Letters and Commentary, Jubilat, among others. Currently, he’s an Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University where he manages the new journal, Map Literary (www.mapliterary.com).

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink

Bennington Writers – Boston Night

Monday, November 25th  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Alden Jones will be tonight’s featured reader. Joining her will be Steven LaFond, Erin Trahan, and Ken Harvey.

Alden Jones is the author of the recently published book, The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) and the story collection Unaccompanied Minors (New American Press, forthcoming in 2014), winner of the New American Fiction Prize. She holds degrees from Brown University, New York University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and now teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College.

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink

Bennington Writers – Nonfiction

Monday, October 28th  –  6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Peter Trachtenberg will be tonight’s featured reader. Joining him will be Nancy Jainchill, Judith Hertog, and Tara Kelly.

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of the memoir 7 TattoosThe Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning, and Another Insane Devotion, a book about the search for a missing cat that’s also an encoded exploration of love and marriage (it’s now out in paperback from Da Capo Press). His essays, journalism, and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Whiting fellowships and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Trachtenberg teaches in the Writing Program of the University of Pittsburgh and currently is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink

Bennington Writers – Fiction

Monday, September 30th – 6pm
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street, between Bleecker & West 4th
Subway Stop – West 4th Street

Katherine Hill will be tonight’s featured reader. Joining her will be David Kalish,
William Bryan Smith, and Maureen Duffy.

Katherine Hill is the author of a novel, The Violet Hour, published by Scribner this July. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in AGNI, The Believer,
Bookforum, Colorado Review, The Common, n+1
, and the San Francisco Chronicle. A graduate of Yale University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, she serves as an assistant editor at Barrelhouse. She lives with her husband in Princeton, New Jersey.

V. Hansmann, host

$8 cover includes a drink