Camille Dungy and Alan Cherchesov will read from their work. Camille Dungy is author of the poetry collections, Smith Blue (winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize), Suck on the Marrow and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf.

Alan Cherchesov is the author of Requiem for the Living. This Russian fiction “skillfully blends the European and the Oriental thinking to create a ‘divan’: a complex Eastern literary genre, bringing to mind a Tibetan carpet. His story about the search for a lost time creates a polyphonic chorus of memories, inspiring associations with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol.” —Die Welt 

An Ossetian writing in Russian, Cherchesov is the author of two novels and a number of short stories. His two novels were short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize and his novel Wreath on the Grave of the Wind was awarded the prize of the Russian Academy of Critics in 2001.