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 are always appreciated.

A starred review in Booklist describes Larissa Pham’s new novel, Discipline, as“a brilliant, entrancing, and provocative mirror-within-mirrors tale of art, story, and power.” Larissa is also the author of the essay collection Pop Song, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She's written essays and criticism for the Nation, Aperture, Art in America, and Granta. A Yale alum, she’s an assistant professor of writing at the New School.

Chad Wriglesworth edited What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison, which came out in July. Geographies of Reclamation: Literature, Art, and Lived Experience in the Columbia River Basin will appear in 2027. Chad is associate professor of English at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. He writes and teaches about the interplay between contemporary American literature, environmental studies, and religious thought. Earlier, he edited Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.

Alice Mattison’s correspondence with Jane Kenyon appears in What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison. Her memoir, Eye Trouble, will come out in July, 2027. Alice is the author of eleven books of fiction, including The Book Borrower and In Case We’re Separated, as well as a collection of poems and The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares.