Southeast Review fundraiser set to offer a night of entertainment
By Lilliana Solovay
This year’s Southeast Review fundraiser offers a night of live readings, an auction, and Halloween costume contests. The annual event is a great way for the nationally recognized literary magazine to give back to the community, and the activities provide a creative outlet for graduate students, undergraduate students, and faculty at Florida State University.
English department graduate students manage, edit, and promote Southeast Review throughout the year. Amanda Hadlock, SER’s assistant editor, is taking the lead on this year’s fundraiser, which will be held Tuesday, October 18, at The Bark in Tallahassee, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
“It's a good community-building event,” Hadlock says.
The readings feature five graduate students—Adachioma Ezeano, Emilio Carrero, Olga Mexina, Anastasia Selby, and Maggie Smith—and three English faculty members—Professor Robert Olen Butler, Professor Virgil Suarez, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise, an associate professor in the department.
Several sponsors contribute to the fundraiser, including local businesses such as Backwoods Crossing, Masa, Maple Street Biscuit Company, and Catalina Cafe, among others, generously donating gift cards, T-shirts, mugs, and other auction items that will be displayed at the event. There will also be “mystery book bundles” auctioned off that are organized by theme.
“Some places donate up to $50 in gift cards, and we’re essentially starting the bidding for all of the donations at half of the value. So, it’s a really good deal,” Hadlock says.
English Professor Celia Caputi will offer tarot card readings during the event in exchange for donations, mystery five-book bundles are available for purchase, and a costume contest is planned, with back issues of SER awarded to the winners.
“I am most excited about hearing the readings,” Hadlock says. “‘This is a fundraiser, but it’s also kind of a Halloween party, so it should be very fun.”
SER is housed in the Williams Building and the department supports its endeavors, but the journal is responsible for raising all of its own money. SER is a non-profit organization, Hadlock says, “but we still pay our contributors, anybody whose writing or art is featured in the magazine, we still pay them. So that’s where the money raised mainly goes, to paying our contributors.
“We think writers and artists are undervalued and underpaid. So that's important to us.”
Lilliana Solovay is a junior double majoring in English-Editing, Writing, and Media and Political Science.
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