Writers in Camden: Alumni Reading

Acclaimed authors and Rutgers-Camden MFA alumni Katie Bennett, Caroline Rash, and Marie Scarles will read from their work. This event will be held in the Rutgers-Camden Campus Center, Multipurpose Room. Katie Bennett is a writer based in Philadelphia. Her first book, She Was Wild Grass, will be released by Brink Books September 2026. She’s published work in Lit Hub, swamp pink, and The Rumpus and received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Monson Arts. She runs the reading series Personal Velocity. A groundbreaking hybrid memoir, She Was Wild Grass deftly intertwines Bennett’s own artistic coming-of-age with the haunting story of Joan Vollmer, the remarkable yet overlooked figure of the Beat Generation whose life was tragically cut short when her husband, William S. Burroughs, shot her in 1951. Braiding past and present, Bennett explores art, ambition, gender, and freedom, asking what it means to create in a world where women’s stories are so often silenced and forgotten. Caroline Rash is a writer, educator, and quilter. Her work has been published most recently in North Carolina Literary Review, Fine Print, Connotation Press, and Decider. She serves as associate editor at the South Carolina Review and her creative nonfiction was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Alex Albright Prize. In Because the bullet arrives, guns can serve as talismans, for both men and women, of desire and love. Some of Rash's poems are vivid speculations about mortality, and affection for those no longer with us; others celebrate contact with water, contact of body to body, body in contact with the larger world. Throughout the collection we hear voices of both struggle and achievement, inspired by close family bonds and anticipation of new life. Marie Scarles' poems, essays, and reviews have been published in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. By day, she works as the Communications Director for NY Renews, a coalition of nearly 400 environmental, labor, youth, and community groups organizing for climate justice across New York. In The Catastrophes, Scarles excavates the legacies of the lands she lives with and on, describing the beauty and brutality of abandoned factories, highway-side wildflowers, and toxic rivers. Mapping catastrophe’s traces from breakfast eggs to late-night shifts at the bar, this collection asks: in a time of destruction, what can be cultivated from the ruin? Free admission. Registration encouraged. Refreshments provided. Books available for purchase.