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 at these Center for Literary Arts Events 

(fuller descriptions below) 

2/7: Matt Hohner, Coffee with a Writer, 10 AM, CLA 

2/13: Valentine’s Reading, 7 PM, Clatter, 15 S. Broadway

3/3: Philip Metres Reading, 7 PM, Lewis J. Ort Library, 3rd Floor 

3/11: Patricia Henley Reading, 7 PM, Main Street Books, 2 E. Main St. 

4/4: Virginia Crawford and Sam Schmidt, Coffee with a [pair of] Writers, 10 AM, CLA 

4/30: Lynne Schmidt Reading, 7 PM, CLA 

5/2: Bob Kunzinger, Coffee with a Writer, 10 AM, CLA 

Every Second Wednesday: Women’s Writing Meetup, 7 PM, CLA

Additional events, such as the Backbone Mountain Review Reading will be scheduled. See https://www.frostburg.edu/center-for-literary-arts/

Valentine’s Reading 

2/13, 7 PM, 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.

Philip Metres: 3/3, 7 PM, Lewis J. Ort Library, 3rd Floor 

Philip Metres is the author of twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018), Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015). His work—poetry, translation, essays, fiction, criticism, and scholarship—has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Watson Foundation. He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.”  He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. He lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @PhilipMetres

Patricia Henley 3/11, 7 PM, Main Street Books, 2 E. Main St. 

Patricia Henley is the author of three novels, five collections of stories, two chapbooks of poetry, and a stage play. Her first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the National Book Award and The New Yorker Fiction Prize. Haywire Books published a 20th Anniversary Edition of Hummingbird House in November, 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and other journals. Her first collection of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star (Graywolf), won the Montana First Book Award. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Circle of Women, The Last Best Place, and other anthologies. Apple & Palm, her collection of linked stories, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026. For 26 years she taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University. She teaches a monthly Zoom workshop for women writers and lives in Kingston, Washington.

Lynne Schmidt, 4/30, 7 PM, CLA

Lynne Schmidt is the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, and a mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. They are a 2025 Maine Arts Fellow, second-place winner of the 2024 National Federation of State Poetry Societies Founders Contest, winner of the 2021 The Poetry Question Chapbook Contest, 2020 New Women’s Voices Contest, and the author of the chapbooks, “Dying Dog Poems,” “The Unaccounted For Circles Of Hell,” “Dead Dog Poems” and “Gravity.” In 2012, they started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her pack of dogs and one cat to humans.

Coffee with a Writer

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

Matt Hohner 2/7 

Matt Hohner won the 2023 Jacar Press Full-Length Book Competition for his book At the Edge of a Thousand Years (selected by Carolyn Forché; now out of print), published in March 2024. Thresholds and Other Poems, his first full-length book, was published by Apprentice House Press in Fall 2018. Hohner has published in Poetry Ireland Review, Breakwater Review, Smartish Pace, Rattle: Poets Respond, New Contrast, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, takahē, the Cardiff Review, Stony Thursday, and elsewhere. He has been a finalist for the Moth International Poetry Prize and won the Maryland Writers’ Association Poetry Prize. He won the 2016 Oberon Poetry Prize, the 2018 Sport Literate Anything but Baseball Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Doolin Writers’ Weekend Poetry Prize in Ireland. Hohner has held two residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, made possible by a grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. He has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award and a Pushcart. Hohner is Poetry Editor for Loch Raven Review. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

[No Coffee scheduled in March] 

Virginia Crawford and Sam Schmidt 4/4 

Virginia Crawford is a long-time teaching artist with the Maryland State Arts Council. She has co-edited two anthologies: Poetry Baltimore, poems about a city and Voices Fly, An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program from CityLit Press. She earned degrees in Creative Writing from Emerson College, Boston, and The University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Her book Touch appeared in 2013 from Finishing Line Press. She writes and lives in Baltimore.

Sam Schmidt's books include Suburban Myths (Beothuk Books 2012) and Dark Bird (Galileo Press 2024).  He is a copy editor specializing in creative works and can help you develop your poetry manuscript.

For more than a decade he edited and published WordHouse, a newsletter for Maryland writers, and hosted the reading series WordHouse at the Minás Gallery.

 His poems have been published in such journals as Passager, Free State Review, and Gargoyle. He is a two-time recipient of the Maryland State Individual Artist Grant and has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from the Johns Hopkins University.

Bob Kunzinger 5/2 

Bob Kunzinger's work has appeared in publications as diverse as the Washington Post, World War Two History, and St. Anthony's Messenger, as well has hundreds of other journals, and several of his essays have been noted by Best American Essays. He is the author of 12 books, including the critically acclaimed The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia, and his new work, Curious Men: Lost in the Congo. His books have been praised by Tim O'Brien, SE Hinton, Martin Sheen, NPR, Midwest Book Review, Sharon Dilworth, and more. He lives along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. 

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.