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Visiting Writers and Speakers, Spring 2008
Molly Bang, author-illustrator of over a dozen children's books and illustrator of another dozen, also wrote the standard text on picture books -- Picture This: How Pictures Work (1991, revised ed., 2000). A work assigned in Children's Literature classes around the country, Picture This uses simple shapes to explain the basic visual grammar of illustrations. In her own picture books, Bang chooses the style to suit the subject matter. Nobody Particular: One Woman's Fight to Save the Bays (2000) mixes the style of the graphic novel with the style of the picture book. The Paper Crane (1985) uses a cut paper collage. Red Dragonfly on My Shoulder (1992) employs photographs of food and Bang's models of food. The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher (1980) mixes sharply contrasting colors, and blends realistic detail with darkly impressionistic imagery. When Sophie Gets Angry -- Really, Really Angry (1999) uses broader brush strokes and moves in the direction of caricature. In sum, she is a versatile illustrator. Molly Bang will speak on "Playing with Comics." The event is co-sponsored by K-State's English and Art Departments, K-State Libraries, the Manhattan Public Library, Claflin Books and Copies, Kansas Publications, and the Kansas Art Commission.
Bryan Penberthy currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2000, while an undergraduate at Kansas State University, Penberthy was selected as an Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Project award winner for the poem "Utah Before Stars." Its appearance in Willow Springs the following winter marked his first major publication. In 2003 Penberthy completed his MFA at Purdue University, where he received the Leonard Neufeldt Award for his work. During his time at Purdue, Penberthy served as Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review. Penberthy's poetry has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Bat City Review, Blackbird, Coal City Review, Crazyhorse, New Orleans Review, Poetry International, River Styx, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere.
Dunya Mikhail, poet, Friday, March 28, 3:30 p.m., Hale Library Hemisphere Room. 
Born in Baghdad, Dunya Mikhail has published four collections of poetry in Arabic and one in English. They include (titles are translated from the Arabic) The Psalms of Absence, Almost Music, and The War Works Hard. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. The War Works Hard won PEN’s Translation Award and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 best books of 2005. Mikhail’s work has appeared in many anthologies including World Beat—International Poetry Now, Iraqi Poetry Today, New Arab Poetry, and The Poetry of Arab Women. She has a Master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies from Wayne State University in Michigan, and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Baghdad.
Allison Wallace is the author of A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home. She hails from the piney woods of southeastern Louisiana, in the upper toe of the “boot,” right on the Pearl River and about an hour’s drive from New Orleans. Having spent her childhood there and along coastal Texas and Mississippi, she went on to attend the University of Mississippi and later the University of North Carolina, where she completed doctoral work in American literature in 1992. Her first full-time faculty post, at Unity College in central Maine, lasted nine years, where she taught interdisciplinary humanities courses in the literature and history of the American land. Since 2001 she has taught at the University of Central Arkansas—minus a half year spent on a Fulbright grant at the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan. As time permits, she enjoys reading, writing, hiking, canoeing, traveling, gardening, and—of course!—keeping honeybees. Food and farming, as well as the art of the essay, remain her personal and professional passions. Pattiann Rogers, award-winning poet. Friday, April 11, 3:30 p.m. Hale Library, Hemisphere Room.
Pattiann Rogers it the author of more than a dozen books, including most recently WAYFARE (Penguin, 2008). She has received two NEA Grants, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2005 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and a 1993 Lannan Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have been awarded the Tietjens Prize, the Hokin Prize, and the Bock prize from Poetry, the Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, in 1993 and 1996, five Pushcart Prizes, and an appearance in The Best American Poetry of 1996, edited by Adrienne Rich. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program with Pacific University. Anthony Doerr, fiction writer, Friday, April 25, 4 p.m., Union Little Theater. Master’s of the Universe, graduate students read excerpts from their final M.A. projects. Friday, May 9, 3:30 p.m., Union 212
Visiting Writers and Speakers, Fall 2007Thursday, October 4, 7:30 p.m., Union Room 212. Denise Low.
Denise Low has recently been named the second poet laureate of Kansas. She grew up in Emporia and received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Kansas in English. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University. She has published ten books of poetry and essays and received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lannan Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission, Poetry Society of America, Roberts Foundation, The Newberry Library, and the Lawrence Arts Commission. Low has taught Creative Writing and American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence since 1984. She was an editor for Cottonwood Review at the University of Kansas for several years, and edited two volumes of poetry, 30 Kansas Poets (1979), and Confluence: Contemporary Kansas Poets (1984). She lives in Lawrence with her husband Thomas Weso.
Charles Baxter is the author of four novels (including The Feast of Love and Saul and Patsy), four collections of stories, three collections of poems, and two books of essays (Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot). Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota. Baxter has received countless awards, including fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund. His work has been selected for The Best American Short Stories five times.
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Molly Bang, author & illustrator, Friday, February 22, 3:30 p.m. Hemisphere Room, Hale Library.
Bryan Penberthy, poet, Friday, February 29, 4 p.m. Union 212.
Allison Wallace, creative non-fiction, Friday, April 4, 3:30 p.m., Union Little Theater.
Friday, October 19, 4:00 p.m., Union Little Theater. Charles Baxter.