The Sleeping Giant Reading Series brings writers and book lovers together on the third Thursday of the month. In the long shadow of Hamden’s Sleeping Giant, writers of every kind gather to hear professional readings, raise a glass, network, and support one another’s work. All are welcome, whether you’re a scribbler who hasn’t yet dared to call yourself a “writer” or an experienced published author.
Curated by local writers Alice Mattison, Sandi Shelton (aka Maddie Dawson), Kathy Czepiel, and Heather Jessen, the Sleeping Giant Reading Series happens every third Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. at Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden, Connecticut. The Sleeping Giant Reading Series is free to attend. Donations at the door for our guest readers are always appreciated. Our readers this month are Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk & Clifford Thompson.
Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk is Founder/Director Emerita (1995-2015) of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Her nine poetry collections include Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize, One Less River, a Kirkus Reviews “Top 2019 Indie Title,” and Maumee, Maumee (2022) memorializing her late-life love Toledo artist Neil Frankenhauser. Twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year, she has won the Pablo Neruda Prize; grants from Michigan Council for the Arts, the NEH, and Kresge Arts in Detroit; and the 2021 Horace Mann Award for Victories for Humanity from her alma mater, Antioch College. After retiring from InsideOut, Terry moved to Hamden to be near her son, Yale Professor Ned Blackhawk, and her grandchildren. A longtime Dickinson devotee, she has read her poetry for the Emily Dickinson Museum’s “Phosphorescence” series and served as a Humanities Advisor to “The Slave is Gone – The Podcast that Talks Back to AppleTV’s Dickinson.”
Clifford Thompson’s new book of essays, Jazz June, is a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. As the Times Literary Supplement says, “rather than recount dramatic turning points” the book “lingers in the ‘in-between times’: unrequited crushes, reflections on ageing, insomnia, quiet Sundays and trips to the cinema.” Cliff received a Whiting Writers’ Award and has written novels—including a graphic novel—as well as books of nonfiction and, currently, a comic strip serialized in Cleaver magazine, “Connecticus Diggs, Cultural Detective.” He’s also a painter and has a show coming up at Blue Mountain Gallery in New York.
