The Genesee Reading Series presents writers from the greater Genesee Valley region, reading in the Writers & Books Performance Space.

November 8: Matthew Kotula & Nathan Pritts

Price: $3 members; $6 public

Matthew Kotula is a writer of fiction and poetry from Attica, NY. In addition to leading workshops at Writers & Books, he is an instructor of writing and aesthetics at SUNY Brockport, and teaches English at Genesee Community College. He earned his MFA from Rutgers University, where he was an editorial assistant for Story Quarterly, and studied with wonderful writers such as Patrick Rosal and Lauren Grodstein. His fiction has appeared in The Adirondack Review. He currently lives in Rochester and is at work on his first novel.

Nate Pritts is the author of eight books of poetry, including Decoherence, which won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and will be published in the fall of 2017. His most recent collection is Post Human (2016) which Publishers Weekly says "leads readers through a poetic dystopia that reveals the fragility of the human relationship with technology. Weaving his poems together as a meditative critique of technology and its numbing effect on the everyday, Pritts asks readers to imagine other possibilities amid ‘this daily flood/of ephemera, this electronic life.’” Publishers Weekly described his fifth book, Sweet Nothing (2011), as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems […] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” POETRY Magazine called The Wonderfull Yeare (2009), “rich, vivid, intimate, & somewhat troubled” while The Rumpus called Big Bright Sun (2010) “a textual record of mistakes made and insights gleaned…[in] a voice that knows its part in self-destruction.”

Pritts is Associate Professor of Film at Ashford University and also teachers occasionally for The College at Brockport and Nazareth College. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.