Rutgers Summer Session Offers Writers’ Reading Series

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Award-winning poet Susan Miller, who teaches poetry and expository writing courses at Rutgers, will lead off the 2010 Writers’ Reading Series presented by the university’s New Brunswick Office of Summer Session Wednesday, June 30. All presentations are free, open to the public and scheduled from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street, on the College Avenue Campus. Light refreshments will be served.

Miller, who also has taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology and New York City College of Technology, among others, has been published in Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review and Commonweal, with another poem forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review. She won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize in February, and her manuscript, The Wing and the Chain, was a finalist for the Autumn House Poetry Prize and a semifinalist for the Kinereth Gensler Award in 2009.

Documentary film writer, editor and producer Dena Seidel will present Thursday, July 15. Her credits include films for National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, Channel 13/WNET, HBO, ABC, the Learning Channel, WGBH, Turner Broadcasting and Court TV. Seidel was a producer and the senior editor of the New York Times Television series "Science Times.” She is the recipient of a New York Festivals Award for Best Editing and a New York Emmy Award for Outstanding Editing.

At Writers House, within Rutgers’ Department of English, Seidel teaches “Digital Storytelling” and “Documentary Filmmaking for Writers.” She is also director of the Writers House Master Class series, a chance for students to discuss the creative process with professional and award-winning filmmakers.

Paul Blaney, writer in residence in the Rutgers Honors Program and a creative writing instructor in the Department of English, will lecture about short fiction Wednesday, July 28. His short fiction has been published in anthologies from Pen & Inc, Fish Publishing and the Small Press Review, among others. He has edited anthologies and collections of short fiction. His awards include the Tom Gallon Prize from the Society of Authors and a prize from the Islamic Society of Great Britain.

Blaney is co-founder of “Tales of the DeCongested,” a short story reading event that takes place each month at Foyles Bookshop in London.