Rick Bass

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, September 20, 6:30 PM
Psychology Auditorium (Psy 105)

Rick Bass is the author of 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, a travelogue, In My Home There is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda (McSweeney’s Press) and A Thousand Deer (University of Texas Press). His short stories and articles have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative, Ecotone, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Esquire, and numerous other publications. He has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, Best American Travel Writing, and Best Spiritual Writing, among others, and has received a PEN/Nelson Algren Special Citation from Robert Penn Warren, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters, in addition to a Montana Artist’s Innovation Award. He has just co-published a spoken word and music album, The Road to the Ryman, recorded at Adam Selzer’s Type Foundry Studio in Portland, with Missoula astral folk band, Stellarondo (named for the character in Eudora Welty’s short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.”) (www.stellarondo.com) He is a board member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council (www.yaakvalley.org), where for 28 years he has been working to help try to protect as designated wilderness the last roadless lands in northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley. He lives with his family in the Yaak Valley and Missoula, Montana.

Lysley Tenorio

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, October 4, 6:30 PM
Psychology Auditorium (Psy 105)

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the story collection, Monstress. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, The Chicago Tribune, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, and has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in the Philippines, he currently lives in San Francisco, and is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

D.A. Powell

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, October 25, 6:30 PM
Psychology Auditorium (Psy 105)

D. A. Powell’s books include Tea, Lunch, Cocktails and Chronic. Chronic was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, The Kansas City Star, and Publishers Weekly. A finalist for both the Publishers Triangle and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the volume of political and personal poems went on to receive the Northern California Book Award and the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Commonwealth Club. Additionally, Chronic received the Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry from Claremont College and was Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Critic Stephen Burt, writing in the New York Times, said of D. A. Powell “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.”

Powell’s work appears in numerous anthologies, including Norton’s American Hybrid, Legitimate Dangers: Poets of the New Century and two volumes of Best American Poetry. His recent poems appear in The New Republic, Granta, American Poetry Review and A Public Space. With David Trinidad and a cast of hundreds, Powell is also co-author of By Myself: An Autobiography (Turtle Point, 2009).

In 1995, with Katherine Hazzard, Powell co-founded and edited Electronic Poetry Review, a pioneer cyberspace journal, which published work from an aesthetically broad field of contemporary poets, including Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, James Tate, Claudia Rankine, Brenda Hillman, Carol Frost, Carl Phillips and Ray Gonzalez. He now co-edits Lo-Ball with poet T. J. Difranceso.

D. A. Powell’s honors have included fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the James Michener Foundation. In 2010, he was Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Poet. And in 2011, Powell was invited to give the Theodore Roethke Memorial Reading at University of Washington.

A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, Powell has taught at Columbia University, University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Davidson College and New England College. He is currently part of the visiting faculty at University of Iowa.

Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys is Powell’s fifth collection of poems.

Philip Metres

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, November 8, 6:30 PM
Psychology Auditorium (Psy 105)

Born in San Diego on July 4th, 1970, Philip Metres grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.  He graduated from Holy Cross College in 1992, and spent the following year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, pursuing an independent project called "Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Response to Historical Change."  After stints as a temp in sundry offices in Boston and Philadelphia, Metres went to Indiana University, where he received a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, both in 2001.  Since then, his writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry.  He is the author of a number of books, including To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007),  Instants (a chapbook, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, Kent State 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling 2004). and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr 2003). He has received fellowships from Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Ledig House, and the Ohio Arts Council. He has been translated into Polish, Russian, and Tamil.  He is an professor of English at John Carroll University, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing, and the proud papa of Adele and Leila.

R. Erica Doyle

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, February 21, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel

R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, DC, Farmington, Connecticut and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best Black Women’s Erotica, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund and Poets and Writers, and she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. Erica is also a fellow of Cave Canem: A Workshop and Retreat for Black Writers.  Her first book,  proxy is forthcoming from  Belladonna* Books in 2013 and has been performed as a chamber piece in collaboration with composer Joshua Fried at the Composers Collaborative, and as a multimedia performance piece with painter and digital media artist Torkwase Dyson at the Transmodern Age Festival.

Natalie Serber

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, February 28, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel

Natalie Serber is the author of the story collection Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).  Her work has appeared in The Bellingham Review, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Inkwell, Hunger Mountain, and others, as well as in the collection Airfare: Stories, Poems and Essays on Flight.  Awards and grants include the Barbara Deming Grant for Women Artists, Tobias Wolff Award, H.E. Francis Award, John Steinbeck Award, all for fiction, and finalist mentions for the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award, and The Third Coast Fiction Award. Natalie received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She teaches writing at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, and she is currently working on a novel set in Boring, Oregon.

Maggie Nelson

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, March 28, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel

Maggie Nelson is the author of four books of nonfiction, including The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (WW Norton, 2011), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007; winner of the Susanne M. Glascock Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship), and The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press, 2007; named a Notable Book of the Year by the State of Michigan), as well as four books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull Press, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and an Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation. Currently she teaches writing, art, theory, and literature in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles.

Eileen Myles

Reading (Free and open to the public)

Thursday, April 4, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel

Eileen Myles moved to New York City from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Snowflake/different streets, a double volume (of poems) came out in 2012 from Wave Books. Eileen's Inferno: a poet's novel (2010) won the Lambda Book Award in 2011 for lesbian fiction. Her more than twenty publications include Sorry Tree (2007), Cool for You (2000), Skies (2001) Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (1994). The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009) received a Warhol/Creative Capital art writing grant in 2007. In 2010 she received the Shelley Prize for her poetry. Eileen writes about books, art and culture for Art Forum, Parkett and Vice and many other publications and she has written catalogue essays on Cathy Opie, Emily Roydson, K8 Hardy, Oscar Tuazon. She’s teaching NYU's graduate program this spring. In 2012 Eileen Myles got a Guggenheim for nonfiction to write “Afterglow” a fantastic dog memoir. [photo by David Shankbone]