GLENVILLE – As part of the ongoing Little Kanawha Reading Series, Glenville State College (GSC) will host the first reading of the fall 2021 semester. This event will feature both Rachael Peckham and Joel Peckham.

The pair will give a literary reading on Thursday, September 23 at 6:00 p.m. at Glenville State College’s Robert F. Kidd Library.

The event is free and open to the public, but strict social-distancing guidelines will be followed, and seating will be limited. The event may also be viewed via live stream on GSC’s YouTube channel on September 23.

Rachael Peckham holds a Ph.D. in creative writing from Ohio University and teaches at Marshall University, where she is the 2017 John Deaver Drinko Fellow and a professor of English. Her prose poems and lyric nonfiction have won prizes and appeared in numerous publications, including the Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, Southeast Review, South Loop Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Joel Peckham is an associate professor of American Literature at Marshall University and the author of seven collections of poetry, including Bone Music (SFAU 2021) and God’s Bicycle. His memoir, Resisting Elegy appeared from Chicago Review Press in 2012 and another collection of essays, Body Memory, appeared from New Rivers Press in 2016. With Robert Vivian, he is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Lyric Prose. His poem, “Astrocartography” recently won the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from the Southern Review. His latest book, Bone Music, explores the loss of his son and first wife from a car accident in 2004. In doing so, it explores how trauma can be a unifying and universally connective and redemptive force.

The Little Kanawha Reading Series is a collaboration between the GSC Department of Language and Literature, the Robert F. Kidd Library, and the Gilmer Public Library. Its purpose is to provide a showcase for a diversity of literary forms and voices in order to acknowledge and enrich the cultural heritage of Appalachia and the communities around the Little Kanawha River.