Visiting Writers and Speakers, Fall 2012 and Spring 2013
Steven Church, nonfiction writer.
Reading: Friday, Sept. 21, 2012, 3:30 p.m. Union Little Theater
Steven Church, an associate professor at California State University-Fresno, earned his MFA at Colorado State University and his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Kansas. He's the author of The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst; Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents; and The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record. His essays and stories have been published in The Best American Essays, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review, and other venues. Church was awarded the Colorado Book Award for The Guinness Book of Me, which has also been optioned for TV by Lionsgate Studios and Fox Television.
Janice Gould, poet.
Reading: Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 4 p.m. Union Little Theater
Janice Gould is an associate professor in Women’s and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where she received degrees in Linguistics and English, and of the University of New Mexico, where she earned her Ph.D. in English. Gould has won awards for her writing from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Astraea Foundation. Her books of poetry are Doubters and Dreamers, Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather, and Alphabet (an artbook/chapbook). She is the co-editor of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry.
Lauren Groff, fiction writer.
Reading: Friday, November 30, 2012, 3:30 p.m. Union Little Theater
Lauren Groff graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Groff’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. She has also published a story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, and a new novel, Arcadia. Groff’s short stories have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Ploughshares and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2007 and 2010 and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
Danielle Evans, fiction writer.
Reading: Friday, March 29, 2013, 3:30 p.m. Union Little Theater
Danielle Evans, an assistant professor at American University, received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and a B.A. in anthropology and African-American Studies from Columbia University. Her short-story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, was a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection for 2011, the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for Fiction, and the winner of the 2011 Hurston-Wright award for fiction. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2010.
Robin Bernstein, scholar.
Talk: Friday, April 5, 2013, 4:00 p.m. Leadership Studies Town Hall
Robin Bernstein, an associate professor at Harvard University, received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University; an M.A. in American Studies from George Washington University; an M.A. in History, Theory, and Criticism of Theatre from the University of Maryland; and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2011), which has won five awards so far — including the Children's Literature Association's Book Award, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Outstanding Book Award, and the New England American Studies Association's Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize. She is also the editor of Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and the co-editor of Generation Q: Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals Born Around 1969's Stonewall Riots Tell Their Stories of Growing Up in the Age of Information (Alyson Publications, 1996). She is currently writing writing a book titled Paradoxy: Lesbians and the Everyday Art of the Impossible. In her words, this new book "shows how racially diverse lesbians in the U.S. have, since the early twentieth century, performed paradoxes on stage and in everyday life."
Susan Jackson Rodgers, fiction writer.
Reading: Friday, April 12, 2013, 3:30 p.m. Union Little Theater
Susan Jackson Rodgers, an associate professor at Oregon State University, received her B.A. from Bowdoin College, her M.A. from Kansas State, and her MFA from Bennington College. She is the author of two story collections: The Trouble With You Is and Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6. Her fiction has appeared in journals such as New England Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, and Prairie Schooner. Rodgers is the past recipient of two Kansas Arts Commission Fellowships and a winner of the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.