June 27th Writers & Order

Melanie Conroy-Goldman
Reading from The Likely World, her novel, which is available for pre-order from Amazon and will be released on August 4th.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman is the author of The Likely World, a novel to be published by Red Hen Press in 2020. A Professor of Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers. Her fiction has been published in Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s and online at venues such as McSweeneys.net. She also volunteers at a maximum security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. Her work is represented by Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency.  She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, daughter and step-daughters.

Dr. Nia Nunn
Reading: “A Black Women Breathing”

Dr. Nia Nunn is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Ithaca College. She teaches and researches in the areas of Black Girl liberation, Black Feminist methodology/pedagogy, educational psychology, and socially conscious performing arts curriculum. She is a performer-scholar-mother-activist, and the President of the Board of Directors of the Southside Community Center in Ithaca. Dr. Nia Nunn has expertise as a teacher, teacher trainer, school psychologist, and director of programs designed to empower and uplift the voices of young people, particularly Black women and girls.

Bob Proehl
Reading from his novel, The Nobody People, literary sci fi, inspired by current events . When a group of outcasts with extraordinary abilities comes out of hiding, their clash with a violent society will spark a revolution - or an apocalypse.

Bob Proehl has worked as a bookseller and programming director for Buffalo Street Books, a DJ, a record store owner, and a bartender. He was a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction and a 2013 resident at the Saltonstall Arts Colony. He is the author of A Hundred Thousand Worlds, The Nobody People, and its sequel, The Somebody People, coming out this September.
 

Emily Sanders Hopkins
Reading from her non-fiction advice column "Emily Writes Back" 

Emily Sanders Hopkins is a writer and illustrator whose cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker magazine and other national publications. She is the author of Emily Writes Back, an  advice column. A book ghostwriter and essayist, she has an essay called "Exotic" in the critically acclaimed 2020 anthology Pretty Bitches.

SingTrece & Kenneth McLaurin
Reading “Say Something” and “If Strange Fruit Must Die” are examples of Moetry, a blending of Music and Poetry.  It's 2020 and African Americans are dealing with problems that were created through our America's history of division, greed, and racism. Through words we share the story of our struggle, pain, and strength as America's second class.

SingTrece is a powerful live performer and soul singer. She is an independent recording artist, a playwright, director, actress, singer, songwriter, mother, and wife. Her voice has been called ''Milk and Honey to the Ears'' and you can't help but feel something with every note she sings. She has toured Europe, singing in Hungary, Malta, Norway, Germany, Italy, and even the Vatican - twice!   She frequently performs locally with a live band.

North Carolina native, Kenneth McLaurin, has long called himself, "The Funniest Person You've Never Heard Of." But his first album, Cuttin Up Comedy at the Shop, his Kitchen Theatre show Southern Fried Ithaca, and Comedy on The Commons is rapidly changing that.  He has written plays for the One Minute Play Festivals at the Kitchen Theatre.  His project 10 Short Films About Race was featured as a part of Spring Writes Literary Festival.   

Currently, Kenneth and his wife SingTrece are producing and performing their own show Singing Notes and Slinging Jokes.  "Life's a joke, find the funny" is his life's motto, and all that know him will tell you Kenneth, has certainly found it.
 

Yvonne Fisher
My Life on Fire: a chronicle of aging through environmental degradation, climate change, and global pandemic. Short personal essay. slam/poetry, humor and pathos.

Yvonne is a writer, performer, visual artist, and psychotherapist. She has written and performed 2 solo pieces called My Viennese Mother, and My Wedding Performance Piece at previous Spring Writes Literary Festivals, at the Kitchen Theatre, in Saugerties, NY, and at the Kraine Theater in NYC. She has been writing and doing theater and improvisation for 50 years and has stories published in anthologies and journals.

Sorayya Khan
Reading from the memoir she is currently writing, tentatively titled, My First Country.

Sorayya Khan is the author of the novels Noor, Five Queen’s Road, and City of Spies  which received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair, 2015. She was awarded a US Fulbright Research Grant to conduct research in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and received a Malahat Review Novella Prize for what became a window into City of Spies.   Her non-fiction work has appeared in, among other places, Guernica, Longreads, and Journal of Narrative Politics. She guest edited the most recent issue of Papercuts, an online literary journal initially focused on South Asia.  She is the daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in Ithaca with her family.   
 

Jen Tennant
Reading from “Dwelling,” which is about houses, abandonment, and memory.  

Jen Tennant is an associate professor of Economics at Ithaca College. Her creative non-fiction has been published in Pleiades, The Smart Set, A VELVET GIANT, and Hoxie Gorge Review. She is also the Artistic Director of the Spring Writes Literary Festival this year. 

November Virtual Spring Writes Literary Festival

The full Spring Writes Literary Festival has been postponed to a November virtual event. Exact dates TBA.

Click on Event Schedule to see the original line-up! We hope to preserve as many of these events as possible to virtual. 

The Spring Writes Festival is a program of the Community Arts Partnership!
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