Forbes Library has selected Art Middleton as its new Writer in Residence. Mr. Middleton will begin a two year term in July succeeding Naila Moreira who has held the post for three years.
The Writer in Residence is a professional writer who furthers the library’s fundamental mission by volunteering approximately five hours each week creating, offering and promoting library programming. The intention of the WIR program is to further the engagement between the library and the community’s writers and readers. “We are so fortunate to live in an area with such a rich literary community. Having a Writer in Residence at the library allows us to reach out to the writers as well as to readers in our community in exciting and meaningful ways,” said Lisa Downing, Library Director.
Art Middleton is a writer, educator, and parent interested in exploring the experience of work, time, care, and community, themes that have shown up in his zines, fiction, prose, performance, and curation. His work has been published and performed in many independent presses and spaces, most recently a collaboration with poet Nicole Trigg in the zine Macaroni Necklace out of Oakland, CA. In 2011, he organized the Magic Child Repository, a gallery exhibit celebrating small press and handmade book culture in Providence, RI. Informed by his experience as a nursing/personal assistant, adjunct professor, and food service employee (a wide but not entirely tangential resume), his fiction draws from the mundane and the everyday to ask questions about how individuals orient themselves in history and place. He currently works as a writing instructor and English lecturer with a focus on utopian longing in politics and literature.
You can read an interview from 2014 with Art: The “Write Stuff: Art Middleton on a Slowing Down Despite a Quickening in the Guts”. SFWEEKLY. Oct 30, 2014.