YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Jennifer Pashley is the award-winning author of two short story collections and three novels, the latest of which is The House Guest (Little, Brown July 2026). Her stories have appeared widely in journals like Mississippi Review, PANK, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and she has been awarded the Red Hen Prize for Fiction, the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction, and the Carve Magazine Esoteric Award for LGBT Fiction. She lives in Syracuse with a nine-person ska band.

V. A. Vazquez was born and raised in Buffalo where she currently teaches English. A former Fulbright Distinguished Teacher at the University of Glasgow, she spent five years living in Scotland, in a town inhabited by countless baby sheep. The Death Row Club is her debut novel, and was a Goodreads Readers' Most Anticipated New Book for July and an Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Mystery.

This event will be offered in person and on Zoom.

Online

Ruth Dickey is the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation and has spent 30 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. The recipient of a Mayor's Arts Award from Washington, DC, and a grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth is the author of Our hollowness sings (Unicorn Press, 2024), and Mud Blooms (Harbor Mountain Press, 2019).

Ellen Kombiyil is a visual artist and author of two books and two chapbooks, most recently The American Journal of Insanity's Diagnostic on the Plumbing & Wiring of Females (Visual Poetry Series Award, Anhinga 2026), and Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024). She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize, and 2025 winner of the Tupelo Quarterly Prize for Cross-Disciplinary Writing. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College in New York City.

This event will take place on Zoom.

YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

David Weiss has published six collections of poetry, most recently Little Mirror (Lynx House) and No Tomorrow (Tiger Bark Press); three novels, The Mensch, Cry Baby, and Do Us Part; and four crime novels, the Ditch Witch series. He is also the author of the brand-new collection of essays on poetry, And Living Things Too. He edited Seneca Review for many years, and taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

This event will be offered in person and on Zoom.

Online

Janice Harrington is the author of four books of poetry. Her latest book, Yard Show, winner of the 2025 Anisfield Wolf Book Award, fuses history, cultural expression, and the natural world to look at how African Americans shape a sense of place and belonging in the small towns of the Midwest. Her previous books of poems include Primitive, In the Hands of Strangers, and Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone. Harrington is also an award-winning children's writer. She is the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

This event will take place on Zoom.