Seavey Reading Series

Laurence Roth is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories; co-editor, with Nadia Valman, of The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures; and editor of Modern Language Studies. His forthcoming book, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore, is published by Rutgers University Press.

Roth is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English at Susquehanna University, where he also is director of the Jewish & Israel Studies program and The Build Collaborative, a project-based center for liberal arts, business and creativity.

Khalisa Rae is an award-winning multi-hyphenate poet, educator and journalist. She is best known for her community activism and nonprofit management as the co-founder of Poet.she, the Invisibility Project and Athenian Press-QPOC writer’s collective, resource center, and bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Her first chapbook, Real Girls Have Real Problems, was published in 2012 by Jacar Press and later adapted into a sold-out play called, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Being a Woman.” Her early work with stage performance and slam poetry landed her on stage at the National Poetry Slam, Women of the World Poetry Slam, Individual World Poetry Slam and Southern Fried Regional Poetry Slam, among others. Her 2021 debut collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, was published by Red Hen Press.

Akil Kumarasamy’s debut novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and Lambda Literary Award. Her linked short story collection, Half Gods, (FSG, 2018), was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic and American Short Fiction, among others.

She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program and a 2024 25 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Anna Badkhen is the author of seven books, most recently the essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality (New York Review Books, 2022). Other books include Fisherman’s Blues: A West African Community at Sea (Riverhead Books, 2018), Afghanistan by Donkey (Foreign Policy Magazine, 2012) and Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories (Free Press, 2010). Her essays, dispatches and short stories appear in periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Common, Harper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times.

Badkhen was born in the former Soviet Union and moved to the United States in 2004.

Gary Fincke’s books have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, The Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Nonfiction Prose and the Wheeler Prize for Poetry. In 2025, he published five new books, including a new poetry collection For Now, We Have Been Spared (Slant Books), After Arson: New and Selected Essays (Madville Press) and The Comfort of Taboos: More Selected Stories (Braddock Avenue Books).

He founded Susquehanna University’s Writers Institute in 1993 and its creative writing major in 1996. Fincke directed the Institute for 21 years before his retirement.

Alan Gilbert is the author of three poetry books, The Everyday Life of Design (Studio/SplitLevel Texts), The Treatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts) and Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books). He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/ Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature.

He is the website editor for BOMB Magazine and adjunct associate professor in Columbia University’s MFA writing program.