On the third Wednesday of the semester, SUNY Brockport Associate Professor, writer and artist Tate Shaw visited students in the Writer’s Craft class and spent time with the wider public in a reading and Q&A at Fannie Barrier Williams Liberal Arts Building.
Shaw himself has had different roles at SUNY Brockport for over 15 years and being involved in the Writer’s Forum to promote people creating art has only cemented his passion.
“I’ve had some really engaging experiences, I understand that people are human beings and not avatars on a page, this humanizes the thing that often gets highly privileged or elevated,” Shaw said.
Shaw spent time discussing his artistic process, the many ways of bookbinding and his newly published books “Every Car” and “Words and Flesh.” Both were published in 2025 and are available for purchase at the Lift Bridge Book Shop in Brockport for $5 each.
“Images can become kind of tossed away, you can process them really fast, with language I had to slow down,” Shaw said.
Dr. Austin Busch co-runs the Brockport Writer’s Forum with Professor James Whorton, who teaches the Writer’s Craft classes in the fall semester. Before the public reading, Busch welcomed Shaw and detailed his current projects as well as his other novel “The Ground,” partly inspired by him burying a book into the ground.
“The Writer’s Forum has been around for almost 50 years, with almost 500 videorecorded author interviews in our archives,” Busch said. “It is nothing short of amazing that Brockport’s Writers Forum has maintained a tradition of bringing writers of this caliber to campus and facilitating interactions between them and students. I feel honored to be stewarding this tradition at the moment as co-director and constantly feel the weight of that responsibility. Of course, I would love for more people on our campus and in our community to take advantage of the opportunities we provide for engagement with such amazing writers.”
Fellow co-runner Professor James Whorton is working to partner with different departments at SUNY Brockport to increase the reach that the event series will have.
“I’m super excited Austin Busch is now co-directing the Brockport Writers Forum. Aside from being a scholar of classical literature, he is bringing a wonderfully varied set of writers to Brockport this semester–a science fiction novelist, an essayist writing about Ukraine, and a translator of the Aeneid, among others. He is also building new connections with the Honors College, which he directs,” said Professor Whorton.
The Brockport Writer’s Forum is part of the Writer’s Craft class, where students spend time reading and dissecting each book, before
meeting with the author to get an intimate Q&A before the wider public join in.
“As a first-time Writer’s Forum attendee and a Creative Writing major, I think this is such a cool opportunity to learn from writers of all kinds. It was awesome getting to dive into Tate Shaw’s work tonight and hear more about his creative process,” SUNY Brockport student Cadence Lopez said.
Students and members of the public mixed during the reading, being treated to an exclusive preview of Shaw’s latest work “Concessions,” partly inspired by his family and the political events of 2016. This has not yet been published.
To find out more about Tate Shaw’s work, his website is https://www.tateshaw.com/
To follow more about the Brockport Writer’s Forum, all upcoming events are free and open to the public. The next author appearance is Jennifer Marie Brisnett on February 26, from 7.30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Fannie Barrier Williams Liberal Arts Building in McCue Auditorium.
