Events & Announcements

Save the dates for these Center for Literary Arts events, and check back or keep an eye on our Instagram and our Facebook group for links and further details. 

Please join us for these spring Center for Literary Arts events. 

Here’s the digest version. Greater details on each event (and author bios) follow. 

2/14: Valentine’s Reading, 7:00 p.m., Clatter, 15 S. Broadway

3/1: Lisa Sheirer, Coffee with a Writer, 10:00 a.m., CLA 

3/25: Russell Shorto Reading/Book Launch, 7:30 p.m., Main Street Books, 2. E. Main St.

4/5: Scott Silsbe, Coffee with a Writer, 10:00 a.m., CLA  

4/10: Robert Eric Shoemaker Reading, 7:30 p.m., Main Street Books, 2 E. Main St.

4/24: Jessica Manack Reading, 7:30 p.m., Lewis J. Ort Library, 3rd Floor

5/3: Gary Fadley, Coffee with a Writer, 10 AM, CLA 

5/6: Steven Leyva, 7:30 p.m., Lewis J. Ort Library, 3rd Floor

Every Second Wednesday: Women’s Writing Meetup, 7:00 p.m., CLA 

Valentine’s Reading 

2/14, 7:00 p.m., Clatter, 15 S. Broadway, Frostburg 

An open reading on a theme of love. Read a poem to or for your beloved or enjoy hearing other people read. Readers are welcomed to bring their own or a favorite writer’s work. Clatter will offer light refreshments for sale. 

Reading Series

Nationally and regionally-known writers read from and discuss their work.

Russell Shorto: 3/25, 7:30 p.m., Main Street Books, 2. E. Main St., Frostburg 

Book release reading / party for Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America. 

Shorto is the director of the New Amsterdam Project at The New York Historical and senior scholar at the New Netherland Institute. Shorto believes history is most meaningful when explored through individuals in conflict. He writes books of narrative history, which have been published in fourteen languages and have won numerous awards. He was given a knighthood by the Dutch government for advancing Dutch-American historical awareness and was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. https://www.russellshorto.com/

Robert Eric Shoemaker: 4/10, 7:30 p.m., Main Street Books, 2 E. Main St., Frostburg 

Robert Eric Shoemaker (he/him) is a poet, translator, and interdisciplinary artist. He is the author of three books: Ca’Venezia (Partial Press, 2021), an artist’s book of hybrid writing and visual art; We Knew No Mortality (Acta Publications, 2018), poetry and memoir; and the poetry chapbook 30 Days Dry (Thought Collection Publishing 2015). https://reshoemaker.com/

Jessica Manack: 4/24, 7:30 p.m., Lewis J. Ort Library, 3rd Floor, Frostburg State University 

Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in her hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Still: The Journal, SWWIM Every Day, and Fine Print, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a 2022 Curious Creators Grant. 

Manack’s Gastromythology is a meditation on how the ways we nourish – or fail to nourish – one another can form an origin story. From enjoying it, to shunning it, to becoming it, food is something with which modern girls and women have a complex relationship, all of which is explored unflinchingly in this volume. Through artfully-crafted verse in a variety of forms, Manack takes the reader from the awakenings of sexuality, to the microbiome of a mother’s body, to the disorienting culinary landscape of a new country, all the while pondering the ways a person feeds, and is fed by, their landscape. https://www.jessicamanack.com/

Steven Leyva: 5/6, 7:30 p.m., Lewis J. Ort Library, 3rd Floor, Frostburg State University 

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, is forthcoming from Blair Publishing in March 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design. https://stevenleyva.wordpress.com/

Coffee with a Writer

These informal readings and wide-ranging, organic discussions begin at 10:00 a.m. in the Center for Literary Arts, RM 237 Lewis J. Ort Library

Lisa Sheirer: 3/1 

Lisa Sheirer is a visual artist living and working in Frederick, Maryland. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking from West Virginia University and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Notre Dame.

In the fall of 2023, Lisa self-published two artist books (WaterShed and A Book of Ghosts) with the help of a Frederick Arts Council grant. The books are about regional plant and animal life and can be purchased regionally.

Scott Silsbe 4/5 

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. His poems have been collected in four books: Unattended Fire, The River Underneath the City, Muskrat Friday Dinner, and Meet Me Where We Survive. He is also an editor at Low Ghost Press.

Gary Fadley 5/3

Fadley is a great-grandfather, a former firefighter, and U.S. Army Sergeant. 

Having grown up in Cresaptown, he currently lives in Cumberland and has had poetry and stories published in Journal of the Alleghenies, Allegany Magazine, and Backbone Mountain Review. 

All Center for Literary Arts events are supported by the Allegany Arts Council, the Community Trust Foundation, the City of Frostburg, MD, the Lewis J. Ort Library, and several offices at Frostburg State University, including the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of English and Foreign Languages.

FSU is committed to making all of its programs, services, and activities accessible to persons with disabilities. You may request accommodation through the Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance Office, 301.687.3035, TDD 301.687.7955.

FSU's campus parking lots are open to all in the evening, no permit required.

Some past Center for Literary Arts Events have been archived on YouTube.