Fresno State Hosts Live Readings of Poetry and Stories at Writers Summit
The Smiitcamp Alumni House at Fresno State, where the Fresno Writers Summit was held. – Photo by Catherine Cole Weber
Fresno, Calif. (KFSR) –
Fresno State hosted the third annual Writers Summit on Sept. 27, featuring live readings of stories and poetry. It brought together professional authors who are graduates from Fresno State, along with student writers at the university.
Inside Fresno State’s Smittcamp Alumni House, a crowd gathered in the conference room to hear the reading performances from alumni and student authors. The event celebrated the writing culture of Fresno, and it gave student writers the chance to share their work with an audience and connect them to the writing community.
Jefferson Beavers is the president of the Fresno State Creative Writing Alumni Chapter. He and four other Fresno State alumni first created the chapter in 2016.
“We wanted to create a space where we could gather creative writing alumni from across generations,” said Beavers. “There have been about four generations of creative writing people at Fresno State dating back to the late 1950s, when the great poet Philip Levine started teaching here.”
This event marks the third performance of the summit, and Beavers believes the event provides a way for Fresno State students to grow as authors.
“They have an opportunity to share that work with their peers. I think at least two of them. It was their first readings,” said Beavers. “So that’s amazing, you know, it’s a very receptive audience on a big stage to share their work.”
The student writers who performed at the event were part of the creative writing prize showcase and were being celebrated for their award-winning writing.
Celeste Jones is a first-year graduate student in the MFA program with a focus in poetry. She has attended every Fresno State Writers Summit to date.
“I always love the writers’ summit, I’ve attended and read it now for three years,” said Jones. “It’s always incredible. like not just to get the opportunity to be up there and read, but to hang out with so many amazing writers and friends.”
Jones read her poetry at the event, which expressed themes of nature and the body. Jones said she has found community by attending and performing at the summits and that she has become more confident as a public reader as a result.
“The first time I showed up, I dragged a friend there because I was so scared. I was like, I don’t know any of the writers. I’m just going to be here to listen to this person,” said Jones. “Now, when I attend an event, it is like I look and see just a room of people I know so familiar. And it’s truly, attending the events that created it for me because I wouldn’t have met these people any other way.”
Steven Sandage is a first-year MFA student in poetry and co-executive editor of the San Joaquin Review. Sandage said the summit was a great opportunity for Fresno writers to come together and support each other. “It’s very rare that we all get a chance to be together like that because we’re all so busy all the time,” said Sandage.
He read his essay about his personal connection with the play “Fences” by playwright August Wilson, reflecting on its themes of troubled family and personal growth. Reading at the event gave him a chance to share his emotions with an audience.
“I loved the fact that as soon as I finished, every person that I ran into explained to me that was kind of what they loved about my reciting, is that it felt like it was touching me, and it wasn’t just something I was reading off the paper,” said Sandage.
Phoua Lee is a third-year MFA graduate student in fiction. She reflected on the experience of performing for the crowd at the summit and how it affects her as a writer.
“Having the Fresno Writers Summit event is essential to student readers like me, because it gives us a place to come together in solidarity and community,” said Lee. “I know that just reading there and having an audience listen, that’s what truly matters to us, especially in these challenging and divisive times.”
Lee’s poetry communicated anger and determination to the audience, which she feels is a way to connect people with the realities her writing explores, and that writers performing their work allows them to directly interact with audiences.. “It feels like we’re reaching out and resonating with people and having them consider issues that they’ve probably never considered before,” said Lee.
Chapter President Beavers believes the Fresno Writers Summit represents a piece of the rich writing culture of Fresno that is important to recognize and celebrate.
“Our creative writers right now, I feel like, are writing with a lot on the line,” said Beavers. “There’s a lot happening in our country and in the world. They are writing about a range of personal and global matters.”
The Fresno Writers Summit is one of the ways that Fresno’s writing community is highlighted, showing its qualities and diversity that carries on with the next generation of writers.
“This is California, to me, this is the real California,” he said. “We have every age, gender, nationality, language here, and I feel like these students are really writing with urgency.”
The Fresno State Writers Summit will continue to be held every year, as students will go on to become alumni authors and inspire the next generation of Fresno’s writing community.