Literary Reading with Roger Topp and Dafna Young
Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 6 pm
Bear Gallery, 2300 Airport Way Fairbanks, AK 99701
Fairbanks Arts is pleased to present a literary reading with Roger Topp and Dafna Young.
This free event will start at 6 pm in the Bear Gallery. We welcome masked individuals with a cap of 20 audience members and attendees must register online below. This event will be livestreamed on Facebook Live for those who are unable to attend in person.
Click here to register for the reading in the Bear Gallery!
Click here to stream the reading from Facebook Live at 6 pm on Thursday, October 14!
Roger Topp grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia where he planned to be an architect. He attended the University of Virginia’s school of engineering and graduated with a degree in Environmental Science, but spent most of his time in writing workshops and at the theatre, not to mention skipping many classes altogether. Roger came to Alaska to study at UAF’s Institute of Marine Science (Mark Johnson, advisor) and then creative writing at UAF’s MFA program (Frank Soos, advisor).
Roger is a builder of furniture and a maker of games, a prize winning poet, and an award winning fiction writer. He has won six state championships and one national championship in fencing. For more than twenty years, he has worked at the UA Museum of the North, currently as the Director of Exhibits, Design, and Digital Media.
His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, The Maine Review, Dunes Review, Into the Void Magazine, Whiskey Island, Bennington Review, Zyzzyva, and West Branch, among many others. His Collection, Imaginary Friends: A Not Entirely Nonfictional Memoir, is currently seeking representation.
Roger will read short excerpts from published work and from his novel in progress. With characteristic overconfidence, he hopes these fragments, when brought together, will create something new.
For more information (and a great many photographs), visit Roger’s website at www.thewellandthewicked.com.
Dafna Young comes from storytellers, teachers, and community leaders going back generations in both her mother’s and father’s lineages in the Old City of Jerusalem, Ha’Ir Ha’Attica. Before poetry metamorphosed into a minor competitive sport, Dafna led readings at UCLA’s Kerckhoff Coffee House and Art Gallery, facilitated the UCLA Writer’s Group for two years, and graduated into Beyond Baroque Foundation’s poetry circles, including the Wednesday workshops with Bob Flanagan and the women’s multicultural group with Michelle T. Clinton. Following the LA Riots, Dafna moved from poetry to performance art in several collaborative events including evenings at Highways performance space and the Santa Monica Art Gallery.
On the side, Dafna paid rent by ghostwriting and worked with Janice Pennington, a three decade Price is Right game show hostess, on a memoir manuscript. Edited, it was published as Husband, Lover, Spy recounting the sudden disappearance of Ms. Pennington’s husband while mountaineering on K-2 near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Exhausted by Los Angeles, or rather, by Hollywood, Dafna meandered north and fell into the MFA program at UAF. Fairbanks has been her home for alternate decades ever since. While here, she continues to write, translate ancient Hebrew poetry, teach, and hide from the world.
Dafna acknowledges that she is now writing and working on the ancestral land of the Lower Tanana people. She also acknowledges that these lands are the unceded, ancestral lands of the Dene people who stewarded the lands for thousands of years and continue to steward them. She wishes to thank the Dene for sharing their home and express respect for their enduring relationship to their homelands.
Dafna will read a selection of her poems and translations interspersed with pieces by fellow Alaskan authors.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact (907) 251-8386 or email literary@fairbanksarts.org.
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