Visiting writers series launches with founder of O, Miami
Poet P. Scott Cunningham, founder and director of O, Miami, a Knight Foundation-funded organization that works to expand and advance literary culture, is at Palm Beach State College today to kickoff off a new visiting writers series on the Lake Worth campus.
Cunningham will do a public reading at 6:30 p.m. in Stage West. This morning, he spoke to a Contemporary Literature class, and he gave a public talk at 12:30 p.m. on the second floor of the library.
Titled “Two Seasons Reading Series,” the event is sponsored by the campus Communications Department and the Creative Writers Alliance student club. Organizers plan to bring a poet and a fiction writer to campus each semester to connect students and the public with established writers. Ayşe Papatya Bucak, who teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at Florida Atlantic University, will be the visiting fiction writer Nov. 23.
“We want to engage students with writers that are publishing to broaden their horizon,’’ said English Professor Mary Galvin, who is the advisor for the Creative Writers Alliance.
“We’re trying as a College to offer students the most robust experience possible,’’ said Professor Nicholas Larocca. “Bringing in writers from outside the college community enhances their experience. This is an opportunity for students to hear from a different voice. We have a lot of students at this College that are interested in writing.”
Cunningham’s work has appeared in The Awl, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, PANK, H.O.W. Journal, Columbia: a journal of art + literature, and others. In 2011, he founded O’ Miami to bring literature to the greater Miami community through a visiting writer series, a poetry festival, a publishing imprint, and other programs.
Bucak’s prose has been published in a variety of magazines, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, and The Rumpus. Her short fiction has been selected for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, and she has been awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship by the state of Florida, as well as residencies at Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony and The Studios of Key West. She is a contributing editor for the literary journal Copper Nickel.
