We like to go places with our members, and to have cool member events that will be interesting and give us all a chance to chat and connect. So in this upcoming academic year, here are a few author events happening at St Ben’s.

We are setting these up as informal member events. We will be attending each of these readings, and will happily meet up to have dinner/coffee in advance, or will hold chairs for you so we can sit together as a group! Email us at admin @ cmle.org if you want to attend any of these with us:

• Chris Albani: Public reading and talk: Stories of Struggle, Stories of Hope: Art, Politics and Human Rights Tuesday, September 17 at 7:00 p.m. Gorecki Family Theater, Benedicta Arts Center, CSB (free, ticketed event). Talk followed by an audience Q&A.
• Shena McAuliffe: Public Reading: October 24, 2019 Upper Gorecki 7:00 PM
• Sally Wen Mao: Her reading will take place on February 4th in Upper Gorecki at 7:00 PM.

FALL 2019

Chris Abani

Chris Abani will be in residence from September 15-18, 2019 with his reading in the Gorecki Family Theater on Tuesday September 17 at 7:00 PM. Abani is known as an international voice on humanitarianism, art, ethics, and our shared political responsibility. He is a bestselling novelist and poet PEN Freedom-to-Write winner. Check out Abani’s work here. 

Shena McAuliffe

Public Reading: October 24, 2019 Upper Gorecki 7:00 PM

Shena McAuliffe grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado. Her novel The Good Echo won the Big Moose Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. Her stories and essays have been published in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, True Story, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

SPRING 2020

2019-2020 Sister Mariella Gable Award Winner

Sally Wen Mao

Mao is the is the 2019-2020 Sister Mariella Gable Award recipient for her work Oculus and will be in residence February 2, 2020 through February 5, 2020. Her reading will take place on February 4th in Upper Gorecki at 7:00 PM. 

From her publisher Graywolf Press, “Sally Wen Mao is the author of a previous poetry collection, Mad Honey Symposium. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships at Kundiman, George Washington University, and the New York Public Library Cullman Center. Her work, Oculus, explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence speaks in the voice of international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.”