Patricia Spears Jones Poetry Reading, September 20
Creative Non-Fiction Week, October 16-19
Maggie Nelson & Martha Collins Poetry Reading, October 25th
A. Van Jordan & Dorianne Laux Poetry Reading, November 8th
Patricia Spears Jones Poetry Reading, September 20
African American poet and arts writer, Patricia Spears Jones is author of two poetry collections, The Weather That Kills from Coffee House Press, 1995 and Femme du Monde from Tia Chucha Press, 2006; and the play 'Mother' commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines and a new commission Song for New York: What Women Do When Men are Knitting, which Mabou will premiere in 2007. Her poems are anthologized in Poetry After 911; bumrush, a defpoetryjam; Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Best American Poetry 2000; Black Sister; and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. Journal publications include Black Renaissance Noire, Bomb, nocturnes (re) view, Court Green, Agni, Barrow Street, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Project Newsletter, Telephone, The World and on the web at http://www.poetz.com, http://www.sandrapayne.com, and http://www.mipoesias.com. Art, theater, poetry and music reviews and interviews are in Bomb, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Black Issues Book Review, The Boston Globe, and Essence. She is a co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women, contributing editor to Heliotrope. She received fellowships to Bread Loaf, the Millay Colony, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and awards from the NEA, NYFA, the Foundation for Performance Arts and the Goethe Institute for travel and research in Germany. She has taught at Parsons School of Design, Sarah Lawrence College, and Naropa University and for Cave Canem.
Creative Non-Fiction Week, October 16-19
Creative Non-Fiction week is a series of readings and panels sponsored by the departments of English, Fiction Writing, and Journalism. For more info, see the Creative Non-Fiction Week website.
Maggie Nelson & Martha Collins Poetry Reading, October 25th
Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull Press, 2005), a mixed-genre book which was named a Finalist for the 2006 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Her other books of poetry include The Latest Winter (2003), SHINER (2001), and the forthcoming collection Something Bright, Then Holes. A nonfiction book about her family and criminal justice will be published by the Free Press/Simon & Schuster in March 2007. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the City University of New York, and has taught creative writing and literature at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Pratt Institute of Art, and Wesleyan University. Currently she teaches on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Valencia, California, and lives in Los Angeles.
Martha Collins is the author of the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). She has published four earlier collections of poems and a recent chapbook, Gone So Far (Barnwood, 2005), and has co-translated two collections of poetry from the Vietnamese, most recently Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da (Curbstone, 2005, with Thuy Dinh). Her awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship. She founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and since 1997 has taught at Oberlin College, where she is Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oberlin, Ohio.
A. Van Jordan & Dorianne Laux Poetry Reading, November 8th
A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise published by Tia Chucha Press in 2001, which won a 2002 Pen/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A published by WW Norton Co. in 2004, for which he was awarded a 2004 Whiting Writers Award and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He also received a Pushcart Prize in 2006. His new book, Quantum Lyrics, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Dorianne Laux is the author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke (2000). She is also co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton,1997). Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, was published by W.W. Norton in fall of 2005. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and collections, and her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese. Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize for poetry, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Laux is an Associate Professor and works in the University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program. She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, and her daughter Tristem.
