Since 1990, we have featured a series of regional writers and poets who are published and read nationally. We invite you to hear poets, novelists, and essayists of the Southeast read from their work, ask questions of them, and enjoy fellowship with other friends of the arts. When possible, the Fiction Addiction bookshop will be on hand to sell the authors’ books.
Fourth Mondays at 7 p.m. – Jan-May, Aug-Oct
(no reading room during the months of June, July, November, and December)
Chicora Alley, 608b South Main Street Greenville, SC 29601 Phone: 864-232-4100
History
It was in 1990 around the dining room table of then President Alice Conger Patterson that a small brainstorming group conceived the idea of the Emrys Reading Room. It has enjoyed a long, uninterrupted history since then though it has been a peripatetic one. Readings have been scheduled in a number of places: Falls Cottage, when the Metropolitan Arts Council was housed there, Annie’s Café, the Village Café, the Coach House Restaurant at the Peace Center, Coffee Underground, the Warehouse Theatre and the Handlebar. Currently readings take place on the fourth Mondays of most months (except November, December, June and July) at Chicora Alley, located at 608B South Main Street. Readings feature published regional writers. During the spring everyone looks forward to the tradition of having students from the Fine Arts Center and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities read their work.
Monday, May 23 – Keller Cushing Freeman & Starkey Flythe
Keller Cushing Freeman is a poet and prose writer, a founding member of the Emrys Foundation, and a great friend of the arts in South Carolina. She is the author of the chapbooks Corinthians, Walking Kiawah, Walking Like a Waterspider, and the co-author of Shadow of Suribachi: Raising the Flags on Iwo Jima. Her latest book is called Kiawah Blue.
Starkey Flythe, Jr. graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennesssee, served with the army in the Middle East and Africa, and was re-founding and managing editor of the Curtis Publishing Company magazines, Holiday and The Saturday Evening Post. He has taught in public high schools in Georgia, South Carolina, and Indiana, and his stories have been anthologized in the Best American, New Stories from the South,and O. Henry collections. His book of short fiction,Lent: The Slow Fast,was published by the University of Iowas Press in 1990. He is a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. The Futile Lesson of Glue is his third collection of poetry.
Recent Authors at the Reading Room
Monday, April 25
Students from the Governor’s School and the Fine Arts Center read their poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Susan Hasler grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in 1983, where she spent the next twenty-one years. Her jobs at the CIA included: foreign documents officer, speechwriter, editor, and counter-terrorism analyst. Intelligence is her first novel.
A former inventor and senior scientist with an international manufacturing business, Lou Dischler made a stand one day, refused to wear the safety glasses, resigned, and dedicated himself to writing fiction. Cajun by birth, he now makes his home in Spartanburg. His first novel, My Only Sunshine, published by Hub City Press, follows nine-year-old Charlie Boone, his gravel-eating younger brother Jute, his bank-robbing uncle Dan and girlfriend, and his Memaw and Papaw through their misadventures in this hilarious Cajun comedy set in Red Church, Louisiana, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Claire Bateman is the author of six collections of poetry: The Bicycle Slow Race (1991), Friction (1998), At the Funeral of the Ether (1998), (2003), ClumsyLeap (2005) and Coronology (2010). She has won the Louisiana Literature Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Writing Prize, a Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Robert Frost Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Greenville, where until 2008, she taught creative writing at the Fine Arts Center.
David Bajo was educated at the University of San Diego, the University of Michigan, and UC Irvine. For seven years he worked as a journalist covering border culture along the California-Mexico boundary. He has lived in Los Angeles, northern California, New Jersey, and Idaho, and has traveled extensively in Mexico and Spain. In 2008, he published his first novel, The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, and in 2010, Panopticon. Currently he teaches writing at the University of South Carolina, where he lives in Columbia with his wife, the novelist Elise Blackwell, and their daughter.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Dan Chaon is the author of the short story collections Fitting Ends(1996) and Among the Missing (2001), and the novels You Remind Me of Me (2004) and Await Your Reply (2009). He has been nominated for the National Book Award, won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award, been included in the Best American Short Stories, and received the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at Oberlin College.
Chicora Alley, 608b South Main Street Greenville, SC 29601 Phone: 864-232-4100
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