 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Faith Adiele (non-fiction) and Tim Seibles (poetry), January 13
Faith Adiele is author of Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), a memoir set in Thailand that won the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Biography/Memoir of 2004. She is also writer/subject of My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about her Nigerian/Nordic heritage, and co-author of The Student Body: A Novel (Random House), a trashy thriller co-written with three college pals (and selected as one of Cosmo's Top 10 Beach Reads of 1998). Her award-winning essays on travel, identity and spirituality have been widely anthologized and published in such periodicals as Essence, Ploughshares, Transition, Ms., 4th Genre, Indiana Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She is currently Assistant Professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh.
Tim Seibles. In addition to his latest book of poems, Hammerlock, Tim Seibles is the author of four other collections of poetry, Body Moves, Hurdy-Gurdy, and the chapbooks Kerosene and Ten Miles An Hour. He is a former NEA fellow and received an Open Voice Award from the 63rd Street Y in New York City. Most recently he was a finalist for The Library of Virginia Book Award for Poetry. His work has been featured in anthologies such as New American Poets of the ’90s, Outsiders, In Search of Color Everywhere, Verse and Universe, and A Way Out of No Way. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia where he teaches in Old Dominion University's English Department and MFA in Writing Program.
Hilary Masters (non-fiction) and Crystal Williams (poetry) February 3
Hilary Masters was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 3, 1928. Altogether he has published eight novels, two collections of fiction, a memoir and a collection of personal essays. His most recent novel is Home Is the Exile, Permanent Press, 1996. His memoir, Last Stands: Notes from Memory was published by David Godine in 1982. Recent works include a collection of essays titled In Montaigne’s Tower, published by the University of Missouri Press in 2000, and Shadows on a Wall: Juan O’Gorman and the Mural at Pátzcuaro, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005. Masters’ short fiction has been cited in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His work has essays have been anthologized in The Best Essays of 1998 and The Best American Essays of 1999, In 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave his work its Award for Literature. He was recently noted as one of Pittsburgh’s 50 Cultural Forces by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983.
Crystal Williams is the author of two collections of poetry, Kin and Lunatic. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Williams has published poetry and essays in many journals and anthologies including, Ms. Magazine, 5AM, The Indiana Review, American Poetry: the Next Generation, Poetry Nation, Sweet Jesus and Beyond the Frontier, among others. She is a member of the 1995 Nuyorican Slam Team and holds degrees from NYU and Cornell Univesity. She currently teaches in the English Department at Columbia College Chicago.
Ladette Randolph (fiction) and Erin Flanagan (fiction), March 3
Ladette Randolph is associate director of University of Nebraska Press where she acquires widely in the humanities. She is the author of the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics (University of Wisconsin Press) and editor of the anthology A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers (University of Nebraska Press) and the forthcoming Bentgrass: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers (Spring 07). The recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation grant and Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award, her work has been reprinted in the Pushcart prize volume and Best New American Voices. Short fiction and essays have been published in numerous literary journals including Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, The Clackamas Literary Review, and Connecticut Review.
Erin Flanagan's short story collection The Usual Mistakes is out this fall in the new Flyover Fiction Series by the University of Nebraska Press. Her stories have been published in Colorado Review, Connecticut Review, North Dakota Quarterly, the Best New American Voices anthology series, and elsewhere. She's held fellowships recently at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Wright State University in Dayton Ohio.
Sheryl St. Germain (non-fiction) and Philip Terman (poetry) April 7
Sheryl St. Germain has taught creative writing at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, Iowa State University, and is currently director of the MFA program at Chatham College where she teaches both poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has received two NEA fellowships, an NEH, and the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, as well as the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and most recently the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including TriQuarterly Review, Chatahoochee Review, New Letters, River Styx, and Calyx. Her books include Going Home, The Mask of Medusa, Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, and The Journals of Scheherazade. A book of lyric essays, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, was published in Spring 2003 by the University of Utah Press.
Philip Terman is the author of the poetry collection The House of Sages (Mammoth Books, 1998) and Book of the Unbroken Days (Mammoth Books, 2004). Poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and Tikkun. He teaches creative writing and literature at Clarion University, where he also directs the visiting writers series and advises the literary journal, Tobeco. As well, he co-directs the new literary festival at the Chautauqua Institute (anyone interested in more information about this lit festival can email him at terman@clarion.edu). He lives in a one-room schoolhouse with his wife and two daughters outside of Grove City, PA. Samples of his work.
Pamela Painter (fiction) and Gary Copeland Lilley (poetry), May 5
Pamela Painter is the author of the award-winning story collection, Getting to Know the Weather, and of a recent collection titled The Long and Short of It. She is also the co-author of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, and Night Train, among others, and in numerous anthologies. She has received grants from The Massachussetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s The John Cheever Award for Fiction. She is a founding editor of StoryQuarterly. A recent story is forthcoming on a Norton CD titled “Love Hurts.” Painter lives in Boston and teaches in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Program at Emerson College.
Poet Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of The Subsequent Blues. Originally from Sandy Cross, North Carolina, Lilley was a longtime resident of Washington, D.C., where he was a founding member of the Black Rooster Collective. He received the D.C. Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry in 1996 and again in 2000, and he earned a MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2002. He currently lives in Chicago.
George Looney (poetry), Eric Schwerer (poetry) and Anthony Butts (poetry) June 2
George Looney’s most recent book, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, won the 2005 White Pine Poetry Prize. His other books include Attendant Ghosts, Greatest Hits (a chapbook from Pudding House Press), and Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh. Looney is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for poetry, as well as two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, and his work has won awards from several literary journals, including New Letters, The Literary Review, and most recently The Larry Levis Editor's Award for poetry from The Missouri Review. He is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Erie.
Raised in Export, PA, Eric Schwerer attended Allegheny College and The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After working as a carpenter in Southeastern Kentucky, Louisiana, and Ohio, he earned a PhD from Ohio University. He has taught poetry to people recovering from mental illness and now teaches in the Creative Writing at Johnstown’s University of Pittsburgh. His poems have been published in numerous literary journals, including Paper Street, Fence, The Journal, Diagram, Third Coast, Quarter After Eight, and Elixir. He is the author of two books of poetry, Whittling Lessons (a chapbook, Finishing Line Press) and The Saint of Withdrawal (CustomWords, 2006).
Anthony Butts teaches creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and has published two books of poetry, Little Low Heaven, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams award, and Fifth Season. He received his PhD in creative writing from the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Sixth Annual Cookout Extravaganza, SATURDAY, July 15 — featuring a smorgasbord of Graywolf Press authors
Graywolf Press is committed to creating a place for original, diverse, and energizing literature. Readers include:
Susan Wheeler (poetry)
Paul Lisicky (fiction)
Robert Hill (fiction)
Joe Campana (poetry)
Martha Collins (poetry)
“Graywolf calls its books literary and serious. This policy of publishing good reads—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—leaves a bright porch light on for new and noncommercial writers.” —The Boston Globe
The cookout is in the backyard of the studio (if it isn't raining). We grill rain or shine. Bring along something for the grill, and your tastiest potluck dish! We're lighting the charcoal at 7pm. Readings at 8pm.
August — Gist Street takes a break!
Chuck Kinder (fiction) and Ruth Ellen Kocher (poetry), September 1
Born and raised in West Virginia, Chuck Kinder has worked as a coal miner, moonshiner, bartender, bouncer, bandit, professional boxer, circus performer, tango teacher, cook, and college professor. As a young itinerant professor he taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Davis, and the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. He is now Director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. His latest book is Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life.
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003) When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2001), winner of the Green Rose Prize in Poetry, and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Washington Square Journal, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Clackamas Literary Review, The Missouri Review, African American Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Antioch, among others, and has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r. She has also worked as a fellow in the Cave Canem Workshop and Retreat. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri and teaches literature and writing at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
WEDNESDAY September 20 – Off-the-Schedule reading with Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour
Stopping at 42 cities in 50 days, the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour is one of the biggest literary events of 2006. Throughout September and October, over 100 poets, along with musicians, magazines, filmmakers, and journalists, will participate as the bus traverses North America, bringing innovative poetry to big cities and small towns across the U.S. and Canada. Sponsored by Wave Books, the poetry bus will go to more places with more poets reading more poems than was ever previously believed possible. (info@wavepoetry.com)
Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett and Lee Peterson (poetry), October 6
Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett was raised in New Orleans and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book of poetry, Roam, was published in 2006 as part of the Crab Orchard Award Series. Susan’s poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and she was recently selected by Poets & Writers magazine as one of the Debut Poets Who Made Their Mark in 2006. Her honors include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize and the Robert Frost Poetry Award as well as fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A member of three national poetry slam teams, Susan recently moved to Pittsburgh to be a visiting faculty fellow with the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University. www.susansw.com
Lee Peterson's first book of poems, Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia (Kent State University Press), won the 2003 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize judged by Jean Valentine. Previously a teacher of English as a second language, Peterson is currently instructor of English at Penn State, Altoona, where she held the position of 2004 Emerging Writer-in-Residence. Her poetry has been published in various journals including North American Review, Runes: A Review of Poetry, Nimrod: International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and The Seattle Review. Peterson received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her BA from Oberlin College.
Richard Jackson (poetry) and Ada Limon (poetry), November 3 – featuring Autumn House Press
Patrick O’Keeffe (fiction) and Valerie Laken (fiction), December 1
Born in County Limerick, Ireland, 1963, Patrick O’Keeffe moved to the US in the late ’80s. He completed a BA in English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington; and a MFA in fiction (2000) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He published “Looby’s Hill” in Doubletake Magazine (2000). The Hill Road is his first book; it earned the Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Award in the Fall 2005. He’s presently working on a novel.
Valerie Laken's first novel Dream House will be published in 2007 by William Morrow. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Chicago Tribune, the Antioch Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and has received a Pushcart Prize, The Missouri Review Editor's Prize, and two Hopwood Awards. She received her MFA at the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches creative writing and composition.
Gist Street Reading Series
Copyright © 2002-2007 Gist Street Readings. All rights reserved.