Dr. Carl Calendar Visiting Writers Series

Fall 2025 Dr. Carl Calendar Visiting Writers Series

All readings are free and open to the public; refreshments will be offered. No reservations/tickets are needed.

Andrew Cusick

Monday, October 20 at 7:00 p.m.
Lincroft, Student Life Center, 2nd floor, Navesink room III 

Andrew Cusick lives and teaches on the Jersey Shore. His work has been published in Booth, The Hunger, Sky Island Journal, Trampset, and elsewhere, and he has previously been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Song for the Dead is his debut novel.

When he’s not writing, you can find him teaching, coaching, running on the boardwalk, surfing terribly, golfing terribly, or hanging out with his wife and kids.

About Song for the Dead

A young man and his mother grapple with the disappearance and possible death of his older brother who may have jumped off a bridge on the Jersey shore.  A searingly original story of the tragedies and indomitable ecstasies of youth on the verge of adulthood, Song for the Dead captures the tempest of being a seventeen-year-old boy in a haunting and lyrical still frame.

Francisco Delgado

Tuesday, November 11 at 7:00 p.m.
Lincroft, Student Life Center, 2nd floor, Navesink room III

On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD
A Novella
Winner of The 2024 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Selected by Steven Dunn

Francisco Delgado is a proud CHamoru and, through his maternal grandmother, Tonawanda Band of Seneca. His chapbook, Adolescence, Secondhand, was published by Honeysuckle Press in 2018. He teaches creative writing and multi-ethnic American literature courses at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). He lives in Queens, New York, with his wife and their son.

“On Remembering My Friends is an honest and tender look at friendships, as well as romantic and parental relationships that question conventional ideas of masculinity. Delgado shows us how the largeness of small kindnesses can last for a long time. This book is a gift of hope. And we don’t see these stories often enough, from anyone, but especially from Chamorro people in the continental U.S.—as Delgado makes achingly clear—trying to connect here to a geographical and cultural homeland that has become abstract. This shit is great—it hits on a lot of levels of love—not just love between these characters, but also we can tell Delgado wrote these characters with love, which to me means he saw and wrote them as full humans with complicated spectrums of being in the world. That’s some gracious shit and I appreciate it. And the book is hilarious!”—Steven Dunn, contest judge and author of water & power

“Throughout this powerful novella, Delgado crafts a narrative that spirals between the present and the past in order to tell the story of Cody Taitano, a mixed-heritage Pacific Islander and Native American who grew up in upstate New York. His voice drew me in immediately: humorous, self-deprecating, and immersed in pop culture. This story, about memory and manhood, friendship and fatherhood, is an exciting and necessary addition to the canon of Indigenous literature.”
—Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory [åmot] and National Book Award winner

Patricia Smith

Finalist, 2025 National Book Awards
Finalist, 2008 National Book Awards

Wednesday, December 3 at 7:00 p.m.
Lincroft, Student Life Center, 2nd floor, Navesink room III

Poet Patricia Smith, the award-winning author of 10 collections of poetry and a National Book Award Finalist, will be reading from and discussing her newest book, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems.

Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and winner of the 2018 Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a 2018 NAACP Image Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award Finalist. A Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She lives in New Jersey.

The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice. Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living.

For more information on the Dr. Carl Calendar Visiting Writers Series, please contact Professor Suzanne Parker, Director of the Creative Writing Program, at sparker@brookdalecc.edu.

Readings are co-sponsored by Student Life & Activities, The Wellness Center and The Center for Transformative Learning.