University of Connecticut |
CREATIVE WRITING EVENTS
Long River Live!
Alternate Mondays: 01/30, 02/13, 02/27, 03/19, 04/02, 04/16
Stern Lounge (CLAS 217), 7 pm
Long River Live! is a bi-monthly, multi-genre arts/performance series where UConn community members are welcome to present work in many forms, including literature, music, dance, puppetry, theater, painting, photography, and film. LRL! encourages cross-genre collaborations and aims to break down the borders that often keep artists in one medium from influencing one another and the world. LRL! has evolved into a forum where students who want to become involved in the UConn arts community meet and exchange ideas. New artists and audience members are always welcome! Join us for feature performances and an open mic.
Mairéad Byrne and V. Penelope Pelizzon
Thursday, September 22
UConn Co-op, 6:00 pm
Co-Sponsored with the UConn Co-op
Born in Ireland, poet Mairéad Byrne immigrated to the United States in 1994. Her books include The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven, Talk Poetry, SOS Poetry, and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird. Jerome Rothenberg describes her most recent collection, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven, as “[a] modest ma(s)terwork of colors & delights, of plays of language (lost & found), the push & pull of parody, of politics & domesticities, of day to day conundrums…”
V. Penelope Pelizzon's first book, Nostos, won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Other honors include a Discovery/The Nation Award, The Kenneth Rexroth Translation Award, and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. She is a co-author, with Nancy West, of Tabloid Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives.
Aryn Kyle/Aetna Writer-in-Residence
Tuesday, October 11
Konover Auditorium, 7:00 pm
Co-sponsored with the Aetna Chair of Writing
Aryn Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals was an international bestseller and the winner of an American Library Association’s Alex Award, a PNBA Award, an MPIBA Award, and others. Her short story collection Boys and Girls Like You and Me was published by Scribner in April, 2010. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a National Magazine Award in fiction. Writing for The Boston Globe, Caroline Leavitt says of her work, “In stark, gorgeous prose, Kyle tunnels into the dark heart of the connections between people and place.... The God of Animals does what the best fiction does -- it creates a whole living, breathing world and unfolds it in front of us, granting us entry into a place that, like this author, is impossible to forget.
Matt Gross: "Writing About Food, Travel, Culture"
Tuesday, October 18, 4pm
CLAS 217 (Stern Lounge)
Sponsored by the Aetna Chair of Writing and the English Department
Join New York Times travel writer Matt Gross for a discussion on writing about food, travel, and culture. Gross is known for his "Frugal Traveler" columns, and his more recent "Lost in..." series. He has also contributed to Saveur and was nominated for the 2010 James Beard Award, and is a co-founder of the parenting blog "DadWagon."
Christopher Boucher and Jane Roper/Creative Sustenance
Wednesday, November 2
UConn Co-op, 6:00 pm
Sponsored with the UConn Co-op
**This event is a benefit for the Covenant Soup Kitchen in Willimantic. Audience members are invited to make a donation after the reading.
Christopher Boucher’s debut novel, How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, modeled on the cult classic handbook of the same name,is the story of a newspaper reporter living in western Massachusetts and trying to raise his son, a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. Writing for Time Out New York, Rhea Ramey calls it “a fun, bluesy work” and “an instruction manual for the human heart.” Boucher teaches writing and literature at Boston College, and is the managing editor of Post Road Magazine.
Jane Roper is the author of Eden Lake, a novel, and Baby Squared, a narrative blog for Babble.com. Her memoir on parenting twins and dealing with clinical depression is forthcoming in 2012 from St. Martin’s Press. Eden Lake, set in a nontraditional, progressive summer camp in Maine, has been called “an unusually accomplished debut” by Tom Perrotta and described as a “sharply observed story of a family assembling and reassembling itself after a father’s death” by Jenna Blum.
Donald Hall
Friday, November 11
UConn Co-op, 11:45 am
Sponsored by the UConn Co-op
Lunch with award winning poet Donald Hall, considered one of the major poets of his generation. He was the poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president at the White House. The Back Chamber, published this fall by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is his first full-length book of poems in a decade. Hall has written a dozen children’s book illustrated by top artists, almost twenty-two books of poetry, plus essays and memoirs.
Sci-Fi/Fantasy Panel with Melessa Tantaquidgeon Zobel
Wednesday, November 16
Stern Lounge, (CLAS 217), 12:00 pm
Co-sponsored by Department of English, and the English Graduate Students Association
This exciting panel will include Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, Pamela Bedore (UConn Professor of English), and Zara Rix (UConn PhD Candidate in English). Featured speaker Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel is the Executive Director of the Mohegan Tribe's Department of Cultural and Community Programs and the author of several works including the novels Oracles (2004) and Fire Hallow (2010) and a young adult novel in progress. Panelists will explore precursors to contemporary fantasy (from detective fiction to American Indian stories) and consider sociopolitical issues at play in fantasy/sci-fi texts and their publishing contexts. To whet your appetites a bit, Bedore and Zobel have tentatively titled their talks “The Bureaucratization of Vampirism in the Sookie Stackhouse Series (Charlaine Harris' novels and Allan Ball's True Blood)" and “Magical Futurism: Raising the Undead in American Indian Literature,” respectively.
I'm Connecticut
December 1 - 10, 2011
By Mike Reiss
World Premiere
Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre
For more details visit the Connecticut Repertory Theatre
Shara McCallum/Aetna Writer-in-Residence
Thursday, February 16
Konover Auditorium, 7:00 pm
Co-sponsored with the Aetna Chair of Writing
Shara McCallum is the author of four books of poetry, The Face of Water: New & Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. She is the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, individual artist grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and other awards. She is Associate Professor of English at Bucknell University, and the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry.
Christian McEwen
Tuesday, February 28
UConn Co-op, 6 pm
Co-Sponsored with the UConn Co-op
Christian McEwen has written for the Nation and the Village Voice, and her poems and essays have been widely published. She is the editor of Jo's Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit & Real Life and a text for environmental education, The Alphabet of The Trees. McEwen has taught poetry, environmental literature and creative writing and has been a fellow at the Yaddo and MacDowell colonies. Her most recent book is World Enough and Time creates a unique combination of history, spirituality, and practical advise about how to incorporate slowness and its benefits into everyday living.
David Gessner/Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction
Thursday, March 1
Konover Auditorium, 4:00 pm
Co-sponsored with the Aetna Chair of Writing and Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series
David Gessner is the author of eight books, including My Green Manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles, Sick of Nature, The Prophet of Dry Hill, and Return of the Osprey, which was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year. His awards include a Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Julie Choffel and Elisabeth Frost
Julie Choffel is an adjunct teaching in the Creative Writing Program at UConn. Her book of poetry, The Hello Delay, was just released. Elisabeth Frost has a new book of prose poems coming out this Spring, All of Us. She is also the author of the critical work, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, and the co-editor of Innovative Women Poets.
Rebecca Morgan Frank/Writers Who Edit, Editors Who Write
Thursday, March 29
UConn Co-op, 5:00 pm
Co-sponsored with the UConn Co-op
Poet Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry 2012) and the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Memorious.org. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Best New Poets 2008, and elsewhere. She has been a recipient of an AWP Intro Journal Award and fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Writers’ Room of Boston, as well as a Tennessee Williams scholarship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Kay Ryan/Wallace Stevens Poetry Program
Monday, April 9 & Tuesday, April 10
April 9: Konover Auditorium, 7:00 pm
April 10: Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, 2:00 pm
Sponsored by the Hartford Financial Services, Inc.
Kay Ryan’s books of poetry include Say Uncle, Elephant Rocks, and Flamingo Watching. Her most recent collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Ms. Ryan's other accolades include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006, and in 2008 was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate.
Poetic Journeys 12th Anniversary Reception
Date and Time TBD
William Benton Museum, Gilman Gallery
Sponsored by The Creative Writing Program, The Design Center, and The Aetna
Chair of Writing.
Poetic Journeys is UConn’s poetry transportation project. It situates professionally-designed posters featuring poems written by UConn students and faculty in the space usually occupied by advertising on campus buses, elevators, and hallways. Inspired by the New York MTA’s “Poetry in Motion” series, Poetic Journeys offer community members a moment of reverie wherever their journey takes then across campus.
Join us as we unveil the new poems and designs that will appear next fall. Meet the featured poets as well as the artists from the Design Center in the School of Fine Arts who bring Poetic Journeys to life.
Long River Review Publication Party
Thursday, April 26
6pm, UConn Co-op
Sponsored with the UConn Co-op
Come help us celebrate the release of the 2011 Long River Review literary magazine! Meet the editors, authors, and artists who made this issue possible, and enjoy readings and artwork by winners of prestigious annual awards including the Collins Literary Prizes, the Jennie Hackman Memorial Award for Short Fiction, and the Gloriana Gill Art Awards.