Visiting Writers Series

 

Visiting Writer Series: Pan-European MFA Alumni Reading & Publishing Panel

Wednesday,  November 17, 2021
7 p.m. – 8 p.m.  EST 

Click here to join the Zoom meeting.   

Meeting ID: 970 2199 8313 
Passcode: 559911

Cedar Crest College’s department of history, literature and languages will host a virtual reading and publishing panel with four alumni of the College’s Pan European MFA in Creative Writing program. The event is part of the department’s Visiting Writer Series and will be held on Wednesday, November 17 from 7 – 8 p.m. EST via Zoom.  

The MFA alumni will give short readings from their new publications and offer advice about writing, publishing and marketing books for new and emerging writers.  

About the Authors  

Amy Lee Lillard was shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize and named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. Her writing appears in Barrelhouse, Foglifter, Angst, Epiphany and Atlas and Alice. Lillard is the co-creator of Broads and Books, the funny and feminist book podcast. She was born and raised in Iowa, lived in Chicago for many years and now lives in Des Moines. 

Spanning genres, continents, and eras, Lillard’s literary debut Dig Me Out  takes on misogyny and homophobia, societal and climatological violence, and the specter of our technologized future — all with a punk rock literary twist. This collection constitutes a brilliant and rightfully dangerous work of art from a writer to tell your friends about. 

M. Allen Cunningham is the author of several novels, including The Green Age of Asher Witherow (an American Booksellers Association #1 Indie Next Pick), Lost Son (a biographical novel about Rainer Maria Rilke) and Perpetua’s Kin. His work appears in many publications. Founder and editor of the award-winning literary publishing house, Atelier26 Books, Cunningham teaches at Portland State University, UC Berkeley and elsewhere.  

Inspired by true events, vividly alive with distinctly conflicted characters and groundbreaking in its evocation of a dizzying, media-soaked half-century, Cunningham’s novel Q&A  dramatizes the misunderstood “quiz show scandals” as a moment of cultural reckoning with reverberations we feel all around us today: in reality television, TV politics, the triumph of incoherence and the pandemic problem of how to be real in a world of screen-induced self-deception. 

Margaret Montet  is a college librarian and professor who writes and speaks about music, blending in elements of memoir, travel, art and literature. Montet teaches Effective Speaking to college students and presents multimedia talks to community audiences around southeastern Pennsylvania and central New Jersey. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Bangalore Review, Clever Magazine, Dragon Poet Review, Pink Pangea, Flying South and other fine periodicals and anthologies. Her collection of travel essays, Nerd Traveler, was born July 2021. 

Join Montet as she sets off across the United States and around the globe on a journey of intellectual curiosity. Combining relevant history, biography and the culture of each city with her own experience and revelations, Nerd Traveler is a series of essays that highlight the joy which can come from moving beyond your comfort zone. 

David R. Roth’s short stories have appeared in Passager Journal, Moss and Every Writer. Of one awarding-winning story, contest judge Janet Benton (Lilli de Jong) noted "the precision of the observations throughout” and called it "elegantly written with a touch of humor." His work focuses on fictional lives lived in fictional river towns in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, his real home for four decades.  

His debut novel, The Femme Fatale Hypothesis  is a contemporary suburban-Gothic tale about a woman with a ferocious desire to defy death, her husband’s increasingly futile attempt to deny death, and their recently widowed neighbor, who tries to help as a way to distract from her own loss and sense of isolation. Love and loss, family secrets, a long-forgotten keepsake and the sexual cannibalism of the false garden mantid all fuel this dark drama that tests the thin line between mercy and murder. 

Past Visiting Writers

Eduardo C. Corral
Annia Ciezadlo
Xuan Juliana Wang
Bathsheba Monk
Karan Mahajan
Staceyann Chin
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Mindy Mejia
Peter Streckfus
Heather H. Thomas
Jeffrey Greene
Amit Majmudar
Robert Antoni
Alison Wellford
Jenny Offill
Iggy McGovern
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Ru Freeman
Bim Angst
Bathsheba Monk
David Kent
Jean Kwok
Amra Brooks
Peter Chilson
Rachel Hadas
Harry Humes
Jorie Graham
Lee Upton
Lisa Zeidner
Jennifer Gilmore
Ben Winters
Danielle Evans
Mary Jane Nealon
Paul Martin
Ruth Knafo Setton
Billy Collins
Galway Kinnell
Mark Doty
Len Roberts
Edwin Romond
Don LoCicero