Sundress Academy for the Arts December Reading Series

The Sundress Reading Series is excited to welcome Ivelisse Rodriguez, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, and Tom C. Hunley for the December installment of our reading series! The event will take place on Sunday, December 3^rd, 2-4 p.m. at Hexagon Brewing Co.

Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Rodriguez grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her short story collection, Love War Stories, is forthcoming from The Feminist Press in summer 2018. Her fiction chapbook The Belindas was published in 2017. She has also published fiction in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, Obsidian, Label Me Latina/o, Kweli, the Boston Review, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications. She is the founder and editor of an interview series, published in Centro Voices, the e-magazine of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers in order to highlight the current status and the continuity of a Puerto Rican literary tradition from the continental US that spans over a century. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She is currently working on the novel ‘The Last Salsa Singer’ about 70s era salsa musicians in Puerto Rico.

Caitlin Hamilton Summie earned an MFA with Distinction from Colorado State University, and her short stories have been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Wisconsin Review, Puerto del Sol, Mud Season Review, Hypertext Magazine, South85 Journal, Long Story, Short, and more. Her first book, a short story collection called TO LAY TO REST OUR GHOSTS, was published in August by Fomite to excellent reviews nationwide. Most recently her poetry was published in The Literary Nest. She spent many years in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado before settling with her family in Knoxville, Tennessee. She co-owns the book marketing firm, Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, founded in 2003. Find her online at caitlinhamiltonsummie.com.

Tom C. Hunley is a professor in the MFA/BA Creative Writing programs at Western Kentucky University, the director of Steel Toe Books, and the lead singer/guitarist for Night of the Living Dead Poets Society. His sixth full-length poetry collection, Here Lies, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. He has also authored six chapbooks and two scholarly books. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Alexandria Peary, of Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). Over 400 of his poems have appeared in journals such as 5 AM, Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review,Exquisite Corpse, Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, New York Quarterly, North American Review, River Styx, Smartish Pace, Southern Indiana Review, The Pinch, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Writer, and Zone 3. Garrison Keillor has read several of Tom’s poems on The Writer’s Almanac.

The Sundress Reading Series is free and open to the public!