The Robinson Reading Room was full on the evening of Wednesday, September 9, where an audience was gathered for the first reading of the season, which featured poet Faith Shearin and our own Mark Brazaitis.

Before Mark read, he relayed the story of how he came to know Faith’s work: The year was 2002. After entering a manuscript into a poetry contest, Mark (who has some experience winning writing contests) was disappointed to be named a finalist, not the winner. When they sent him a copy of the winner’s book, he expected to find that his poems were better. But, page by page, he saw they had chosen correctly. The winner of the May Swenson Award was Faith Shearin, and the book was The Owl Question.

For this event, however, Faith chose to mostly read poems from her newest collection, Telling the Bees. Introduced by second-year poetry student, Elizabeth Leo, Faith’s work, which tells the stories of what it means to be human, is tender and inviting but can also be brutal, inviting a different perspective about the world. Faith is a resident of West Virginia and the author of four books of poetry. Her work is regularly featured on Garrison Keillor’s radio program, The Writer’s Almanac.

Mark was introduced by second-year fiction student Megan Fahey, who described his work as being marked by simplicity and elegance (and I would add, often humor). When asked by students how to publish a book of stories, Mark’s reply was “I don’t know, just win contests I guess.” And that’s how Mark does it. He has won, among others, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the ABZ Poetry Prize, the Gival Press Novel Award, and a distinguished story placement in Best American Short Stories.

Displaying his talent across genres, Mark read a poem about the golden toad between two short stories. The first story featured Chuckles, the killer cat. The second story, “Meet,” about what happens when fathers get involved in their children’s track meet, is from Truth Poker, which won the 2014 Autumn House Fiction Prize and came out at the beginning of this year from Autumn House Press.

You can listen to the reading on the Center for Literary Computing’s Creative Readings podcast.