Reading To Benefit Upstate Food Program

Clemson University’s most-honored fiction writers and poets will read in a campus benefit for Loaves & Fishes at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, in the Self Auditorium at the Strom Thurmond Institute.

The list of performers includes Keith Lee Morris, Jillian Weise, Steven Katz, John Pursley III, Angelina Oberdan, Alex Kudera and Mike Pulley.

“This benefit is a great opportunity to hear some of Clemson’s finest writers and support a very worthy cause,” said Pulley, a poet who organized this year’s Writers’ Harvest. “Come hear some great poetry and fiction and help feed our needy children.”

Writers’ Harvest readings are staged each year during the holiday season by writers and poets throughout the United States. The benefits were launched by Share Our Strength, a national organization that fights childhood hunger. The annual event has a long tradition at Clemson. This year’s reading was aided with a sponsorship by Clemson’s Pearce Center for Professional Communication.

To gain admission to the event, the writers request a donation of canned goods or cash. They will accept checks made out to Loaves & Fishes Inc. 

These are the writers who will participate in the event:

• Keith Lee Morris has published two novels, “The Greyhound God” and “The Dart League King,” as well as two collections of short stories, “The Best Seats in the House and Other Stories” and “Call It What You Want.” Morris won the 2005 Eudora Welty Prize, and his latest novel, “The Dart League King,” garnered a Starred Review and Pick of the Week in Publishers Weekly. He is a professor in creative writing in the Clemson University English department.
• Jillian Weise is the author of a novel, “The Colony,” and a poetry collection, “The Amputee's Guide to Sex.” Her manuscript of poems, “The Book of Goodbyes,” won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and will be published in 2013 by BOA Editions. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Tin House and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Fulbright Program. She is an assistant professor at Clemson and she co-directs the annual Clemson Literary Festival.
• Steven Katz is the Pearce Professor of Professional Communication in the English department. In addition to scholarly books and articles and a poetry chapbook, “Nana!”, he has many poems in publications, including Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Star*Line, Dwarf Star and journals by the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Psychotherapy. His next book, “Plato’s Nightmare,” is forthcoming from Parlor Press.
• John Pursley III is the author of “If You Have Ghosts” and four chapbooks. When he’s not teaching at Clemson, he works as a poetry editor at the Burnside Review and Rowboat: Poetry in Translation and reads fiction for the South Carolina Review.
• Angelina Oberdan teaches advanced writing classes at Clemson. Awarded the 2010 Joy Scantleberry Award for Poetry, she received Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from McNeese State University. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cold Mountain Review, Louisiana Literature, Mobius, Southern Indian Review and Yemassee.
• Alex Kudera’s debut novel, “Fight For Your Long Day,” won the 2011 Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal for Best Fiction from the Mid-Atlantic Region. Kudera’s story “The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity” is available as a 99-cent single wherever e-books are downloaded.
• Mike Pulley was named a Pioneer Poet in the 2008 Poets on Deck project of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. He won the 2005 Dominic J. Bazzanella Award for expository prose and a 2004 Kathryn Hohlwein Award for poetry from California State University, Sacramento. In 1993, he was guest editor of an edition of Rivers, a Northern California journal. He teaches advanced writing and contemporary literature at Clemson.

For more information, contact Loaves & Fishes at www.loavesandfishesgreenville.org or Mike Pulley at 864-650-6094.