Fall 2013 Living Writers Series

August 06, 2013

Living Writers Series Fall 2013: Thresholds and Breaking Points


The writers in this series will present across multiple genres, to include poetry, fiction, criticism, and various hybrid genres.  Each will explore ways that language tests thresholds of culture, race, nation, sex, gender, and desire through the creative imagination.  Central to each will be how these thresholds are performed, tested, broken, clarified and complicated in their works.

 
Location and Time:  All Readings located at Kresge Town Hall 466 6-7:45 PM

 
Readers as Follows:

Lucy Corin: October 10

Frances Richard: October 17

Ruth Ellen Kocher: October 24

Carolyn Cooke: November 7

Naomi Shihab Nye: November 14

Douglas Kearney: November 21


Bios:

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) and the novel Everyday Psychokillers:  A History for Girls (FC2).  The collection One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses was just released from McSweeney’s Books.  Stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Tin House Magazine, New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best and other places.  She’s been a fellow at Breadloaf and Sewanee, and spent last year at the American Academy in Rome as the 2012 John Guare Fellow in Literature.  She now directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Davis.


Frances Richard is the author of Anarch. (Futurepoem, 2012), The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003), as well as the chapbooks Shaved Code (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) and Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008). She writes frequently about contemporary art and is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005). She has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and, most recently, a research grant from the Graham Foundation. Currently she teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

 
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, date TBA), Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press 2014), domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press 2013), One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press 2003), When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering, winner of the Green Rose Prize in Poetry (New Issues Press 2002), and Desdemona’s Fire winner of the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets (Lotus Press 1999). Her poems are widely anthologized, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and Yaddo. She is Associate Chair of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado where she teaches innovative Poetry, Poetics, and Literature.


Carolyn Cooke’s novel Daughters of the Revolution was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker Magazine.  Her short fiction, collected in The Bostons, won the PEN/Bingham Award, and has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. Her new collection, Amor & Psycho, was published by Alfred A. Knopf this summer. Carolyn directs the MFA programs at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.


Naomi Shihab Nye is an Award-winning Palestinian-American Poet, Writer, Anthologist, and Educator. She is the author/or editor of more than thirty volumes of poetry, essays, short stories, novels and anthologies including: 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). She has read and led writing workshops extensively both nationally and internationally. Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature. In 2010, Shihab Nye was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Prize for Children’s Literature.


Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney’s second, full-length collection of poetry, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner’s selection for the National Poetry Series. Red Hen Press will publish Kearney’s third collection, Patter, in 2014. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award and fellowships at Idyllwild, Cave Canem, and others. He teaches at CalArts.


Co-Sponsorship:

Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund

Poets & Writers through the grant from the James Irvine Foundation

Literature Department and the Creative Writing Program

Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading

Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment