Hauntings – Saturday, Sept. 21

Eric Gansworth, Sˑha-weñ na-saeˀ, (Onondaga, Eel Clan) is a writer and artist from Tuscarora Nation. Author of thirteen books, he has also exhibited widely. Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius University, he’s been Visiting Professor at Colgate University. His work has received a Printz Honor Award, was National Book Award Longlisted and won an AILA Youth Literature Award, a PEN Oakland and an American Book Award. Apple (Skin to the Core)appeared on Time Magazine’s 10 Best YA and Children’s Books and Chautauqua Institution’s CLSC Booklist. Gansworth’s work has been supported by the Library of Congress, NYFA, NEH, Arne Nixon Center, the Lannan Foundation and was included in LIT CITY, a public arts project celebrating Buffalo’s Literary Legacy.

Dimitri Anastasopoulos’ novels, A Larger Sense of Harvey and Farm for Mutes, are published by Mammoth Books. His fiction and essays have appeared in journals such as Black Warrior Review, Notre Dame Review and Willow Springs, Callaloo and the Journal of Narrative Theory. Born in Greece in 1968, he now lives in Buffalo, New York and teaches fiction writing and contemporary literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Meredith Conti is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and popular entertainments in the United States and Great Britain. She is the author of Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (Routledge, 2018) and the co-editor of recent essay collections on the intersections of science and performance and on the theatrical macabre. Conti is currently working on her second book entitled Gunpowder Plots: A Cultural History of Firearms and US Popular Performance, 1849-1929, a project that has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Harry Ransom Center, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the American Society for Theatre Research, UB’s Humanities Institute, and UB’s Gender Institute. Conti lives in Buffalo, NY with her family and enjoys hiking, traveling, gardening, and learning about all things spooky and historical.

Tom Reigstad is a fourth-generation Buffalonian. He earned degrees in literature and education at SUNY Buffalo, the University of Missouri, and Canisius College. Tom was a features writer and copy editor at the Buffalo Courier-Express and Niagara Falls Gazette. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at Buffalo State University. Tom received the 2023 Owen P. Augspurger Award for outstanding service in the cause of local history. He is the author of Scribblin’ for a Livin’—Mark Twain’s Pivotal Period in Buffalo. His new book, The Illustrated Mark Twain and the Buffalo Express, was released in February.

The Just Buffalo Writing Center offers free, afterschool creative writing programs for teens. Drawing inspiration from each other and groundbreaking local & visiting teaching artists, JBWC writers are provided access to writing assistance, workshops, literary events, collaborative youth arts initiatives, and platforms to share their creations. Learn more at justbuffalo.org. 

Miriam Thaggert is a Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and teaches courses on 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century African American literature. She is the author of the award-winning Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (2022) and Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (2010). She is also the co-editor of two books on the Harlem Renaissance, A History of the Harlem Renaissance (2021) and African American Literature in Transition, 1920-30 (2022). Her current work centers on Buffalo-area poet Lucille Clifton. 

Laura Kremmel is an Assistant Professor at Niagara University, where she teaches eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century British literature. Her expertise is in Gothic and Horror Studies, Health Humanities, History of Medicine, Disability Studies, Death Studies. She is the author of Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (2022) and the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018). She has also recently published chapters on Gothic Ecoburial in Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (2022), on contagious disease and fears of altering identity in The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century (2023), on literary depictions of disparity and organ harvesting in The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023), and gothic access and disability in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Disability(forthcoming in 2025). She is currently working on a book on the gothic and dementia.

Mark Hodin is Professor and the Chair of the English department at Canisius University in Buffalo, NY, where he teaches classes in writing, drama, and modern American literature.  This presentation draws on his current work on the place of the Holocaust and Jewish identity in Arthur Miller’s drama.  Recently, his article “Willy Loman and Postwar Jewish Insecurity” was published in American Literary History, Volume 32, Issue 1, Spring 2020, Pages 46-76, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz048.

Fortunato Pezzimenti served as the Associate Artistic Director of the Irish Classical Theatre Company (ICTC) from 1993 – 2007.  From 2007 to 2019, when he retired, Fortunato held the title of Producing Director for the company.  Beyond his administrative duties, he directed numerous productions from 1993 until this year, winning many awards for his work.  Most recently he staged “The Price” which was honored with 8 ARTIE nominations, including Outstanding Direction of a Play. Ultimately “The Price” won several ARTIEs, one of them being Outstanding Production of a Play.  Additionally, the piece was honored by Buffalo Spree’s Best of WNY 2024 with Best Production of a Play.

Dr. Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance, and affiliate faculty with the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Mischief (Northwestern UP), and her writing has appeared in Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Theatre Review, the International Journal of Performing Art and Digital Media, and the online journal 
Amodern.  She is also a proud member of Actors Equity, and works locally as an actor and an intimacy choreographer.

Kim Chinquee’s eighth book and debut novel PIPETTE was published in 2022 with Ravenna Press. Her novella I THOUGHT OF ENGLAND is forthcoming with Baobab Press; her prose poetry collection CONTACT WITH THE WILD and her flash fiction collection OCTOPUS ARMS will be published in 2025 with MadHat Press. She co-directs SUNY-Buffalo State University’s writing major, is a competitive triathlete, and lives with her two dogs in Tonawanda, New York. 

Yan Liu is an associate professor in History at SUNY, University at Buffalo. He specializes in the history of medicine in premodern China, with a focus on material practices of medicine, religious healing, the history of the senses, and the global circulation of knowledge. He teaches courses on premodern Asian civilizations, China’s global history, the history of Chinese medicine and food, and the history of the body. His first book, Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China, published by the University of Washington Press in 2021 (open access available), examines the various uses of poisons to cure illness and enhance life in China from the 3rd to 8th century. His current research explores a transcultural history of aromatics and the production of olfactory knowledge in China from the 7th to 13th century.

Maria Arango is studying Environmental Sustainability and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. As a McNair scholar and a recipient of the SUNY Pettigrew Women’s History Research Excellence Grant, they are serving as a researcher and intern for the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project. They are also a long-term environmental justice consultant intern at Mother Earth Literacies LLC, and have been on the boards for clubs such as the UB LGBTA and UB Environmental Students of Color.

The Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project is an organization that preserves and shares the histories of all local LGBTQ community members. We collect oral histories, assist in the preservation of archives, and otherwise document the legacies of Western New Yorkers of all races, genders, ages, and abilities, across the LGBTQ+ identity spectrum. We seek to bridge generational gaps between community members, and to promote the idea that local and regional activist histories matter just as much as those that originated in large cities on the American coasts. And we believe that knowing our histories will guide us into more meaningful political action, both in the present and across the generations.