Writers Harvest reading to benefit local food bank
November 7, 2014
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Writers Harvest, the Purdue University Creative Writing Program's annual benefit reading, will be 7:30 p.m. Nov. 20 at the Wells Center, 638 North Street in Lafayette.
The event is open to the public and each person is asked to bring five non-perishable food items. All proceeds will go directly to Food Finders Food Bank. This year's event will feature readings from Purdue creative writing professor Donald Platt, visiting writer Peggy Shinner, third-year MFA poet Emily Skaja and second-year MFA fiction writer Munib Khan.
Food Finders Food Bank annually distributes 1.4 million pounds of food and dry goods to more than 160 nonprofit agencies in 16 Indiana counties, reaching thousands of hungry people and their families.
Donald Platt's fifth book, "Tornadoesque," is scheduled for publication in 2016 through CavanKerry Press's Notable Voices series. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts from 1996 and 2011, as well as the Paumanok Poetry Award, and of the "Discovery"/The Nation Prize. Platt is a professor of English at Purdue.
Peggy Shinner is the author of "You Feel So Mortal / Essays on the Body" that was published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2014. Newcity, Chicago's cultural weekly, named her one of the Lit 50 2014: Who Really Books in Chicago, and she has been awarded two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships and a fellowship at Ausable Press. She teaches in the MFA program at Northwestern University.
Emily Skaja's poems have appeared on the Black Warrior Review website, in Indiana Review, The Journal, PANK, The Pinch, Pleiades, and Southern Indiana Review. She was a finalist for the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the runner-up for the 2014 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest. Along with Julie Henson, she is the poetry editor of Sycamore Review. She is a third-year MFA poet at Purdue.
Munib A Khan grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and has a bachelor's degree in English literature from Connecticut College. Recipient of the Abrahms Prize for Fiction and Philip M Smyser Prize for Best Short Story, he has won fellowships from Cambridge University and the British Council, among others. He is a second-year MFA in fiction at Purdue.
News Service contact: Amy Patterson Neubert, 765-494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu
Source: Lauren Mallett, assistant director of Creative Writing, lmallett@purdue.edu
