2011-12 Second Semester Reading Dates
All events are free and open to the public.
February
Wednesday, February 1  |  Jack Driscoll & Judith Minty Book Launch Reading
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Jack Driscoll is the author of four novels, four poetry collections, and the AWP Short Fiction Award winner, Wanting Only to Be Heard. He has also received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award, Pushcart Prizes, PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and Best American Short Story citations. He was Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy for 33 years, and currently teaches in Pacific University’s acclaimed low-residency MFA program in Oregon. In The World of a Few Minutes Ago, award-winning author Jack Driscoll renders ten stories from the point of view of characters aged fourteen to seventy-seven with a consistently deep understanding of each character’s internal world and emotional struggles. All of the stories are set against the quiet, powerful northern Michigan landscape and share a sense of longing, amplified by the beautiful but often unforgiving surroundings. With keen attention to the nuances of his characters and their lives, Driscoll explores both their attachments to the past and their as-yet-unseen futures as he considers relationships between loves, old friends, and parents and their children.
Judith Minty is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and four chapbooks. Her first, Lake Songs and Other Fears, was a recipient of the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1973. Her prose and poetry has appeared in over fifty anthologies and in numerous magazines and journals. Minty is also a recipient of the Eunice Tietjens Award, the John Atherton Fellowship to Bread Loaf, Villa Montalvo Award for Excellence in Poetry, two Michigan Council for the Arts Creative Artists Grants, two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and the PEN/Mead Foundation California Fiction Awards. Minty’s deeply felt, archetypal tale of confronting wild nature and self, Killing the Bear has never before been published on its own. This exquisite edition of 110 copies has been embellished with nine wood engravings of noted artist Glenn Wolff. It was conceived and designed by Chad Pastotnik, award-winning publisher and proprietor of Deep Wood Press in Bellaire, Michigan. Each volume’s pages have been hand printed on a Vandercook printing press with lead type and carefully bound by hand. Come celebrate an appreciation for artful words, striking images, fine design and the passion for beauty and truth.
Wednesday, February  8 | Red Wheelbarrow Reading
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Thursday, February  16 | Lia Purpura
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Lia Purpura is the acclaimed author of the essay collections Rough Likeness, On Looking, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Increase, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the poetry collections King Baby, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, Stone Sky Lifting and The Brighter the Veil. Additional awards include an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, among many other fellowships and residencies. Purpura’s poems and essays appear, or are forthcoming in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies.  New essays are forthcoming in Best American Essays 2011 and Pushcart Anthology XXXV.  A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lia Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA. Recently, she served as Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction, Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama’s MFA Program and Visiting Writer at the Bennington Writing Program. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Graylin, and their son.
March
Wednesday, March 7  |  Alice LaPlante
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Alice LaPlante is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and teaches creative writing at both Stanford and San Francisco State University. The author of five books, Alice includes among her publications a writing textbook, Method and Madness: The Making of a Story, published by W.W. Norton in 2009 and Passion to Profits: Business for Non-Business Majors (The Planning Shop, 2008). Her novel, Turn of Mind (Grove Atlantic, July 2011) became a New York Times, NPR, and American Independent Booksellers Association bestseller within a month of release. Turn of Mind was also designated a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an NPR, O Magazine, Vogue, and Globe and Mail Summer Reading Pick, and is featured in Barnes and Noble 2011 Discover Great New Writers program.  Alice has a B.A. in Rhetoric and an MBA from the University of Illinois in Urbana. In addition to her career as a fiction writer, she has more than 20 years experience as a corporate editorial consultant, writing coach, and university-level writing instructor. She has also written for Forbes ASAP, BusinessWeek, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, Discover, and a host of other national publications. She taught at Interlochen Arts Camp during the summer of 2010.
April
Wednesday, April 11  |  Kwame Dawes
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. He is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place. Of his sixteen collections of poetry, his most recent titles include Wheels; Back of Mount Peace; Hope’s Hospice; Wisteria, finalist for the Patterson Memorial Prize; Impossible Flying; and Gomer’s Song. Hope’s Hospice offers a moving glimpse into the support centers and hospice outside of Montego Bay and the many lives that have been lost to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Culled from open dialogue with sufferers and those who care for them, and coupled with evocative photographs, AIDS becomes a channel for universal dramas, archetypal voices, stoicism, despair, and deeply human deceptions. In September 2009, Dawes won an Emmy for New Approaches to News and Documentary for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive site based on Kwame Dawes’s Pulitzer Center project, HOPE: Living and loving with AIDS in Jamaica. Dawes is also deeply influenced by his “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music.” His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. His essays have appeared in numerous journals including Bomb Magazine, Granta, Essence, and Double Take Magazine. Dawes is also an actor and producer, an accomplished storyteller and broadcaster, and was the lead singer in Ujamaa, a reggae band. To date, fifteen of his plays have been produced, most recently his musical, One Love, at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Dawes is currently the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska, where he is a Chancellor’s Professor of English, a faculty member of Cave Canem, and a teacher in the Pacific MFA Program in Oregon.
Thursday, April 19  |  Red Wheelbarrow Reading
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Thursday, April 26  | Writer-in-Residence Reading, Sarah Cornwell
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Sarah Cornwell holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James Michener Fellow in fiction and screenwriting. She is the winner of the 2010 Humanitas Student Drama Fellowship and the 2008 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, a finalist for the 2009 Keene Prize for Literature, and a nominee for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, StoryQuarterly Online, and other magazines. A 2011 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow for Pennsylvania State, she has received support from the Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Norton Island Writers Colony.
May
Wednesday, May 2  |  Screenwriting Reading
Writing House at 7:30 pm
Tuesday, May 15  |  CW Senior Recital #1
Chapel at 8:30 pm
Wednesday, May 16  |  CW Senior Recital #2
Chapel at 7:30 pm