Two award-winning authors will be on campus to help Heidelberg University’s School of Communication, Humanities & the Arts launch the Jean Warren Gekler Writer’s Series. As part of the series, the public is invited to an open reading from the authors’ recent works.
On Monday, Oct. 15, Heidelberg will welcome Hilary Plum, whose novel Strawberry Fields was the winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose (2018). She also received the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award for her nonfiction work Watchfires.
Plum also is the author of the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She worked for a number of years as an editor of international literature, history and politics. Currently on the creative writing faculty at Cleveland State University, she also teaches in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program, a consortium of CSU, Kent State University, the University of Akron and Youngstown State University. Additionally, Plum is the associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich, she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent fiction, essays, poetry and criticism have appeared in various specialty publications.
While on campus, Plum will conduct a workshop for students in English professor Lucy Biederman’s creative writing and literature classes, and then hold an open reading of Strawberry Fields at 2 p.m. in Herbster Chapel. The community is invited to the open reading, free of charge.
On Friday, Nov. 9, novelist and sports writer Susan Petrone will visit Heidelberg. Petrone is the author of The Super Ladies (2018), Throw Like a Woman (2015) and A Body at Rest (2009), which won a bronze medal for regional fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her short story, Monster Jones Wants to Creep You Out (2010), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. On the non-fiction side, Petrone’s work has appeared in diverse venues such as ESPN.com, CoolCleveland and BELT. She co-owns the Cleveland Indians blog, ItsPronouncedLajaway.com, for ESPN.com’s SweetSpot network and is one of the co-founders of Literary Cleveland.
The local community can hear Petrone reading from her most recent novel at 2 p.m. Nov. 9 in Herbster Chapel.
The authors will have copies of their books available for purchase and signing following their readings.
The Writer’s Series is made possible by The Jean Warren Gekler English Endowment Fund and named in her honor. A 1980 Heidelberg alumna, Gekler is the associate director of the MBA Career Management Program in the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. She created the endowment for the English Department to benefit and enrich the educational experience of English majors and all Heidelberg students.