Ollie McSweeney, Contributing Writer
The final presentation in the Red Dragon Reading Series took place on November 11th in the Martin Mullen Gallery with poems by Bertha Rogers and a novella excerpt by Libby Cudmore. Rogers lives in and writes about upstate New York and founded the Bright Hill Press and Literary Center in Treadwill. Libby Cudmore is a finalist for the 2025 International Thriller Writers Award for Best Standalone Mystery. She is the author of the novels The Big Rewind and Negative Girl along with a few short stories, and she is an English professor at Hartwick College. For this reading, she read an excerpt from her novella Alibi in Ice.
Bertha Rogers read 14 poems from her new collection, What Want Brings. Her work contains a lot of description and imagery of nature and the personification of animals and inanimate objects. Rogers’ writing is very elemental and sometimes based loosely in religion and divinity; her poem “On the Road” describes the rapture of a great horned owl in death after being hit by a car. Other poems she read were “Stone and Stand”, from the point of view of the standing stones in England; “To the Stellar Jay”, a poem addressed to a stellar jay she became acquainted with in Oregon; “Mezzo and Dead Collette”, a memoir poem dedicated to Collette Inez; and “Planting”, a poem about planting trees with her family when she first moved to upstate New York.
Libby Cudmore’s Alibi in Ice is a short story following characters that appear in her other work; P.I. Martin Wade and his assistant, Valerie Jacks. In Cudmore’s excerpt, we follow Valerie as she takes care of a sick and bedridden Martin when she happens upon a woman nearly frozen to death outside of a Wegman’s. This is an unpublished piece of her series following these two characters, but she made the story available through email to all attendees of the reading by request. For those who are interested in reading this piece, Dr. Hovis, Associate Professor in English, can email the story. Her writing process begins with a general outline before fleshing out her work, adding meat to the bones of her story.
All the books written by Cudmore that were previously mentioned are available for purchase at The Green Toad Bookstore along with Rogers’ poetry collection. This final Red Dragon Reading Series had a great turnout, with extra chairs having to be brought out so everyone could have a seat. The reading occurred between 7pm and 8pm. The current exhibition at the Martin Mullen Gallery is “Over Water”, featuring paintings by Scherezade Garcia and Kyrin Hobson. Their work tells the story and history of migration and colonization regarding themes of inequality and racialization. These pieces will be on display through December 13th and a reception was held on November 6th . The SUNY Oneonta Red Dragon Reading Series is a month-long campus event led by the English Department faculty that began in 2011. This organization also hosts the New Critics, New Writers Undergraduate Conference and the annual Oneonta Literary Festival along with Hartwick College.
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