MEMOIRIST DARCEY STEINKE AND AWARD-WINNING POET GREGORY PARDLO UP NEXT FOR "FREQUENCY NORTH" WRITERS SERIES AT SAINT ROSE

"Frequency North," the aggressively eclectic visiting writers reading series at The College of Saint Rose, continues its third season with memoirist and award-winning novelist Darcey Steinke and poet Gregory Pardlo, the first writer of color to win the American Poetry
Review/Honickman Prize.

Steinke and Pardlo will read at Saint Rose Thursday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m. in the College's Neil Hellman Library, 392 Western Ave., Albany. (Note: program date is a change from one announced previously.) Copies of their works will be available for purchase and signing.

Steinke's most recent book is Easter Everywhere: A Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2007). Easter Everywhere is a "spiritual search for truth" that draws on Steinke's life growing up in upstate New York – her mother was a former Miss Albany, her father a Lutheran minister. Entertainment Weekly writes that her book "unflinchingly recounts years of disillusionment in her stumble back toward faith." Steinke has authored four novels, most recently (Bloomsbury, 2007). TheMilk New York Times praised two of her books as "Notable Books of the
Year." Her novel Suicide Blonde has been translated into eight languages. Steinke's short fiction has appeared in the Literary Review, Story Magazine and Bomb, and her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Spin and The New York Times Magazine.

Pardlo's book Totem (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) was chosen as the winner of the 2007 American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize, making him the first writer of color to win this prestigious award. In December 2007, Essence magazine selected Totem as a finalist for the publication's first Literary Award for poetry. He is the recipient of a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in poetry, a 2006 fellowship in translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from The New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, the Seaside Institute and Cave Canem. Pardlo's poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Calalloo, Lyric, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Black Issues Book Review and on National Public Radio.

Frequency North is sponsored by The College of Saint Rose School of Arts and Humanities and the English, Spectrum and Identity student organizations, and it is free and open to the public. Frequency North is the brainchild of Daniel Nester, an assistant professor of English at Saint Rose. In creating the series in 2006, Nester set about to plug what he perceived as a large gap in the literary events offered in the Capital Region. He purposely designed the series to be "aggressively eclectic." To date, visiting writers have included champion slam poets, experimental essayists, a writer who uses Google and junk e-mails to create poems and then sets them to music, and a poetry reading cleverly disguised as a TV talk show. In addition to teaching, Nester is the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, both collections about his obsession with the rock band Queen. His creative work has appeared in Best Creative Nonfiction, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll and Best American Poetry 2003, among other places. Nester also writes for Poets & Writers, Time Out New York and Bookslut.

All readings are free and open to the public. For more information, visit the series' website at http://www.FrequencyNorth.com or contact Daniel Nester at 518-454-2812.

Coming up:
Thursday, April 3, 2008, 7:30 p.m.: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz and Shappy Seasholtz
Neil Hellman Library, First Floor, 392 Western Ave., Albany

Labels: Albany, Frequency North, Saint Rose, Shameless self-promotion