Several installments of last spring’s Main Street Reading Series found Oberlin in the midst of a system-clearing April blizzard that made getting from Baldwin to the FAVA Gallery an ordeal. 

Fortunately, Ohio’s schizophrenic weather is only beginning to kick in, which gives no one any excuse to miss the first reading in this year’s Series this Sunday, Sept. 17 at 8 p.m. in the FAVA Gallery at the New Union Center for the Arts. It features the classic pairing of poetry and fiction put on by poet Isabel Galbraith and award-winning novelist Nancy Zafris.   

Galbraith is a graduate student pursuing her MFA in poetry at Ohio State University.  Her poem “Grass Widow” was featured in the Fall 2005 issue of FIELD Magazine, published in the basement of Peters Hall (yes, that Peters Hall).

Zafris is the author of two novels, Metal Shredders (2002) and Lucky Strike (2005).  Metal Shredders was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her short stories have appeared in various literary magazines, and her story collection The People I Know received the Flannery O’Connor Award in 1990. She also serves as fiction editor for the Kenyon Review. 

The Main Street Reading Series, organized each year by creative writing professor David Young and several Oberlin creative writing students, is a wonderful excuse to leave campus, as it takes place in the spacious FAVA Gallery on South Main Street here in Oberlin.

Your contemporary literature appreciation will otherwise be confined to King 106 or some other such fluorescent-lit locale. Veteran attendees are encouraged to bring their friends to demonstrate that hearing people read is not, in fact, boring.