Distinguished Voices in Literature

Distinguished Voices in Literature, SUNY Cortland's Visiting Writers series, brings poets, authors, and scholars to campus for readings and lectures. All events are free and open to the public.

Spring 2025

Reading and Q&A with Aggeliki Pelekidis

author of Unluck Mel

Wednesday, February 26th

5:00pm

Dowd Art Gallery, Dowd Fine Arts Center 106

Aggeliki Pelekidis was born in Brooklyn and was a public relations executive in NYC for a decade. She earned her MA and Ph.D in English with a creative writing emphasis from Binghamton University. Her dissertation, a short-story collection titled Patrimonium, won the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Confrontation, The Masters Review, and many other journals. Her short story, “Blah, Blah, Black Sheep” was selected by Ann Beattie as the winner of a New Ohio Review fiction contest. Her debut novel, Unlucky Mel, was recently published by Cornell University Press’ Three Hills Imprint.

APelekidis Unlucky Mel cover.jpg

Van Burd Memorial Lecture by Dr. Shannon Draucker

author of Sounding Bodies

"Lady Violinists and Acoustical Vibrations: Music, Gender, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British Literature"

Tuesday, April 1st

4:30pm

Old Main Colloquium, 220

Shannon Draucker is Associate Professor of English at Siena College, where she teaches courses in women's, gender, and sexuality studies; nineteenth-century British literature; and the novel. Her first book, Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (SUNY Press, 2024), argues that nineteenth-century scientific discoveries about music's effects on the body transformed how Victorian writers imagined pleasure, desire, and intimacy.

Reading and Q&A with Jamaica Baldwin

author of Bone Language

Jamaica Baldwin

Thursday, April 10th

5:00pm

Jacobus Lounge, Brockway Hall

Jamaica Baldwin (she/her) is a poet and educator originally from Santa Cruz, CA. Her first book, Bone Language, was published by YesYes Books in June 2023 and received a gold medal in the 2024 North American Book Awards. Her work has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, The Slowdown, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Missouri Review, among others. Other accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.

Jamaica has also served as a community-based teaching artist with Writers in the Schools - Seattle, Louder Than a Bomb - Great Plains (an affiliate of Nebraska Writers Collective), and taught a generative writing workshop for women in Guatemala. Her writing has been supported by Aspen Words, Storyknife, Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica has a PhD from the University of Nebraska -Lincoln in English with a focus on poetry and Women's and Gender Studies and she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in New York.

Distinguished Voices in Literature events are supported by the President’s Office, the Haines Fund, the Provost’s Office, the Cortland College Foundation, the Dean’s office, Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee, CAS, the Writing Center, and the English Department.

For questions please contact Heather Bartlett (heather.bartlett@cortland.edu) or Danica Savonick (danica.savonick@cortland.edu)