Will Hermes & Amanda Petrusich, Writers for Rolling Stone and The New Yorker

Thursday, September 29, 2022, 7:30 PM, on Zoom. 

The music writers Will Hermes and Amanda Petrusich will each read from their work, and then join Pitt Associate Professor Peter Trachtenberg in a conversation about their craft, followed by a Q & A.

Will Hermes is the author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice in 2011, and he is finishing a biography of the American musician Lou Reed. A longtime contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” he’s a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Slate, Spin, The Believer, and has been featured twice in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series. He has, at best, mixed feelings about social media, but occasionally tweets at @WilliamHermes.

Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her criticism and features have appeared in The New York Times, The Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her most recent book, Do Not Sell At Any Price, explored the obsessive world of 78-r.p.m. record collectors. She is an associate professor in the writing program at New York University’s Gallatin School.

Please join us through this link: https://hipaa-pitt.zoom.us/j/94830107930

Or go to Zoom.com and enter Meeting ID: 948 3010 7930

2022's Fred R. Brown Award Winner Dantiel W. Moniz

Thursday, October 27, 2022, 7:30 PM. 

Join us for a reading by acclaimed writer Dantiel W. Moniz, followed by a Q & A and conversation. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is the winner of a Florida Book Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, as well as longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Dantiel is the recipient of a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award, a Pushcart Prize, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction.  Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, American Short Fiction, Tin House, and elsewhere. Moniz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches fiction.

We hope to hold this reading in person, and details will be provided about our location in the early fall of 2022. 

Pitt's Visiting Poet-in-Residence, Alison C. Rollins

Thursday, February 16, 2023, 7:30 PM. 

Join us for a reading by our visiting Writer-in-Residence, the poet Alison C. Rollins. She is currently an MFA candidate in Literary Arts at Brown University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. In 2021, her essay "Dispatch from the Racial Mountain" was selected by contest judge Kiese Laymon as the winner of the Gulf Coast prize in nonfiction. Her work, across genres, has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Rollins has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.  

We hope to hold this reading in person, and details will be provided about our location in the fall of 2022.