Past Visiting Writers and Speakers
Spring 2007 Fall 2006 Spring 2006 Fall 2005 Spring 2005 Fall 2004 Spring 2004 Fall 2003
Summer 2007
- Monday, July 16, 7:00 p.m. Little Theatre, K-State Student Union. Scott McCloud.
 Best known for Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics, Scott McCloud is one of the foremost experts on the medium of comics. Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau has said that after reading Understanding Comics, "most readers will find it difficult to look at comics in quite the same way ever again." Alan Moore (Watchmen) calls the book "quite simply the best analysis of the medium that I have ever encountered." And Neil Gaiman (The Sandman series) says, "If you read, write, teach or draw comics; if you want to; or if you simply want to watch a master explainer at work, you must read this book." Following the success of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, McCloud has become much in demand as a public speaker, giving visual lectures at venues as diverse as Harvard University, M.I.T., I.B.M., the Smithsonian, Microsoft, and Pixar. The title of his illustrated talk is "Comics: A Medium in Transition." He describes it like this: "American comics are changing fast. Bolstered by the literary ambitions of the 'graphic novel' movement, a flood of international influences and the growing importance of new technologies, the comics landscape shifts regularly in surprising and increasingly unpredictable directions."
Spring 2007
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Thursday, March 15, 4:00 p.m. Union 212. Melanie Rae Thon.
Melanie Rae Thon's fiction has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Croatian, Finnish, and Farsi. Her most recent books are the novel Sweet Hearts and the story collection First, Body. Melanie's new fiction appears in the O. Henry Prise Stories 2006, Pushcart Prize XXX, and the literary journals Agni, Five Points, StoryQuarterly, and Antioch Review. Professor Thon teaches creative writing at the University of Utah.
 Wednesday, April 4, 7:30 p.m., Main Ballroom, K-State Student Union. Kevin Young.
Kevin Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library in the Woodruff Library at Emory University. Professor Young is the author of four collections of poetry and the editor of Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems; Everyman's Library Pocket Poets anthology Blues Poems, featuring works from Langston Hughes to Gwendolyn Brooks, and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (HarperPerennial, 2000), which features poetry, fiction and nonfiction by the next wave of black writers. His 2003 collection of blues-based love poems, Jelly Roll: A Blues, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. His most recent book is For the Confederate Dead, appearing in January 2007.
 Friday, April 13, 8:00 p.m. Tadtman Boardroom, Alumni Center. Amy Fleury.
Amy Fleury's collection of poems, Beautiful Trouble, won the 2003 Crab Orchard First Book Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2004. Her poems have appeared in The American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, and The Southeast Review, among others. Her fiction has been published in 21st and The Yalobusha Review. Professor Fleury has been a recipient of the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony and a Kansas Arts Commission fellowship in poetry. She lives in Topeka, where she teaches at Washburn University. A K-State alumna (BA and MA), she reads in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the creative writing program.
Fall 2006
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Friday, August 25, 3:30 p.m. Union 212. Welcome Back Reading.
Welcome Back Reading featuring KSU faculty: Elizabeth Dodd, Jonathan Holden, Imad Rahman, Susan Jackson Rodgers. Refreshments will be served.
Wednesday, October 4, 7:00 p.m., Manhattan Public Library. Sue Stauffacher.
Sue Stauffacher will read from her work. She is the author of Donuthead, which won the William Allen White Award for grades 3-5 for 2006. The sequel, Donutheart, will be published later this year. She has also published Harry Sue, a novel with many allusions to the Wizard of Oz.
Thursday, October 5, 4:00 p.m., Hemisphere Room (5th floor), Hale Library. Sue Stauffacher.
Sue Stauffacher will give a talk on the Wizard of Oz allusions in her novel Harry Sue. Her website has a page with commentary, clues, and discussion on the "Oz" aspects of her novel.
Friday, October 13, 4:00 p.m. Union 212. Beverly Lyon Clark.
 Beverly Lyon Clark will speak on “Why I Love and Hate Tom Sawyer.” Clark, Professor of English at Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.), has just finished editing the Norton Critical Edition of Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She is the author of Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2003), the editor of Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge UP, 2004), and the co-editor of Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 1999). For more information, see the news release.
 Friday, October 20, 3:30 p.m. Union 212. Judith Kitchen.
Nonfiction Reading by Judith Kitchen, author of Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory; Distance and Direction, and several other books. She is also the editor of three collections of short essays and a regular reviewer of poetry for The Georgia Review.
 Friday, November 3, 3:30 p.m. Union 212. Darren Defrain.
Fiction Reading by Darren Defrain, author of the novel, The Salt Palace (and KSU graduate, MA 1992). Defrain is the Writing Program Director at Wichita State University. His first novel, The Salt Palace, was a Forward Magazine Book of the Year Finalist. He reads in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Creative Writing Program at Kansas State.
Friday, November 10, 7:00 p.m. Strecker-Nelson Gallery. Poetry on Poyntz.
Reading by KSU students and others.
 Thursday, December 7, 4:00 p.m. Union 212. Dan Chaon.
Fiction Reading by Dan Chaon. Chaon is the author of the novel, You Remind Me of Me and two collections of short stories, Among the Missing (finalist for the National Book Award) and Fitting Ends.
All readings are free and open to the public, and are made possible by the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing.
Spring 2006
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February 8, 7:00 p.m. Hemisphere Room, Hale Library. Kevin Higgins
Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967, and grew up in Galway City. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals in Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada, France, Belgium, Finland, Italy and New Zealand. His work also features in the anthologies Short Fuse, Breaking The Skin: New Irish Poetry, 100 Poets Against The War, and Irish Writers Against War. He was a founding co-editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine and is the poetry critic of The Galway Advertiser. In April 2003 he won the Poetry Grand Slam at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, and went on to represent Ireland in the European Grand Slam in Paris. He is an accomplished performer of his work and has read at literary festivals in Ireland, Britain, the United States & France. His book of poetry, The Boy with No Face, was published by Salmon Press in 2005.
April 6, 4:00 p.m. Union 212. Michael Waters.
 Michael Waters is Professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland and teaches in the New England College MFA Program in Poetry. His books of poetry include Darling Vulgarity (2006); Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001); Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (1997)—these titles from BOA Editions—Bountiful (1992); The Burden Lifters (1989); Anniversary of the Air (1985)—these titles from Carnegie Mellon University Press—Not Just Any Death (BOA Editions, 1979); and Fish Light (Ithaca House, 1975). He has co-edited Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin: 8th Edition, 2006; 7th Edition, 2001) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003), and has edited A. Poulin, Jr.: Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2001) and Dissolve to Island: On the Poetry of John Logan (Ford-Brown and Company, 1984). He has been the recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and three Pushcart Prizes.
April 20, 4:00 p.m. Union 212. Margot Livesey.
 Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. Her father taught a boys’ private school and her earliest memories are of moors, sheep and many boys in uniform. After taking a BA in literature and philosophy at the University of York in England, she spent most of her twenties in Toronto writing, waitressing and finally managing a restaurant. Subsequently she moved to America and began teaching creative writing. Since then she has taught in numerous writing programs including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Boston University and the University of California at Irvine. She teaches at Emerson College in Boston and this fall is teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Livesey is the author of a collection of stories and five novels, including Criminals, The Missing World and Eva Moves the Furniture.
All readings are free and open to the public, and are made possible by the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing.
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- Past Visiting Writers
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Fall 2005
Visiting Writers and Speakers, Fall 2005
 Gary Gildner: Fiction and poetry reading
Thursday, September 15, 4:00, Union 212
Gary Gildner has published twenty books—of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction—including Blue Like the Heavens: New and Selected Poems, Somewhere Geese Are Flying: New and Selected Stories, and The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which received the Iowa Poetry Prize. He has received many other awards for his writing, including the National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes for fiction and non-fiction, the Robert Frost fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Gary Gildner lives in Idaho.
 Robert Root: Creative non-fiction reading
Friday, October 14, 4:00, Union 212
Robert Root is the author of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale. This memoir was awarded the Library of Michigan's 2004 Michigan Notable Book Award. Robert Root is also co-editor of the anthology Fourth Genre, and on the editorial board for the journal by the same name. He is recently retired from Central Michigan University, where he taught courses in composition and rhetoric, nonfiction, editing, English education, literature, and media. Robert Root lives in Colorado.
Photo credit: Caroline Root.
 Ted Kooser, Poetry reading
Friday, November 4, 7:00 p.m., Union Little Theater
Ted Kooser is the Poet Laureate of the United States. He is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently Delights & Shadows, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Among his many honors, he has received two NEA fellowships in poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, and The James Boatwright Prize. He is former vice-president of Lincoln Benefit Life, an insurance company, and teaches as a Visiting Professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Photo credit: Kathleen Rutledge.
 Moya Cannon, Poetry reading
Monday, November 7, 3:00, Manhattan Public Library Auditorium
Moya Cannon has been editor of the Poetry Ireland review. Her first collection of poetry, Oar, for which she received The Brendan Behan Memorial Prize, was published in 1990 by Salmon Publishing. Her second collection, The Parchment Boat, was published by Gallery Press in 1997. A third collection, provisionally entitled Carrying the Songs is nearing completion. She has held a number of residencies, most recently at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. She is a member of the prestigious Irish honorary association, Aosdána.
Spring 2005
- Thursday, March 31, 2005,
- 4:00 p.m.,
- Big 12 Room, K-State Union.
Steven Trout, Associate Professor of English, Fort Hays State University.
Professor Trout will present the paper "'It Was Like This': The First World War in American Fiction and Autobiography." Trout is author of Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
- Friday, April 8, 2005,
- 8:00 p.m.,
- K-State Alumni Center, Tadtman Board Room.
Imogene Bolls will give a poetry reading on Friday, April 8, 2005. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Glass Walker, Earthbound, and Advice for the Climb. She has published over 600 poems in magazines, including Antioch Review, Georgia Review, Ohio Review, and Southern Poetry Review. A native of Kansas, Imogene Bolls has been called a poet of place, because, she says, “I am able to render a sense of the land and beyond. My native state is Kansas; I call Ohio my professional home; New Mexico is my adopted home. Each state has influenced my work deeply.” Bolls has also been the recipient of numerous honors, including individual artist awards from the Ohio Arts Council and the Ohioana Poetry Award. She will returning to KSU—her alma mater—to participate in the English Department’s Alumni Jobs Panel. (See Alumni Connections.) Both the panel and the reading are free and open to the public.
- Monday, April 11, 2005,
- 7:30 p.m.,
- McCain Auditorium.
Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Hours, will read from his work.
Michael Cunningham’s other novels, A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, have received critical acclaim. He also published Land's End: A Walk Through Provincetown, a work of non-fiction. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and DoubleTake. The film version of The Hours, featuring actresses Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, was nominated for eight Academy Awards. A film version of A Home at the End of the World (2004), was directed by Michael Mayer, and features Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts, and Sissy Spacek. Michael Cunningham’s next novel is entitled Specimen Days and will be published in June 2005 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Michael Cunningham received the PEN/Faulkner Award, also for The Hours, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa.
- Thursday, April 14, 2005,
- 7:00 p.m.,
- K-State Union Flint Hills Room.
Carlos Eire, National Book Award Winner for his memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, will read from his work.
Friday, April 15, 2005, 8:00 p.m., K-State Union Flint Hills Room.
Carlos Eire will give a lecture titled “Flying Friars and Hovering Nuns: Writing a History of the Impossible.”
Carlos Eire's idyllic and privileged childhood in Havana came to an end in the wake of Castro's revolution. In 1962, he and his brother were among the 14,000 children airlifted off the island, their parents left behind. In chronicling his life before and after his arrival in America, Mr. Eire's personal story is also a meditation on loss and suffering, redemption and rebirth.
Mr. Eire is currently the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. An authority on religious reformations, faith, and spiritualism in modern Europe, Mr. Eire lectures widely, and is the author of From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain and War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin, and co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions.
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- Past Visiting Writers
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Fall 2004
Welcome Back Reading
Friday, September 10, 3:30, K-State Student Union 212. Welcome Back Reading: KSU Creative Writing Faculty Jonathan Holden, Susan Jackson Rodgers, Imad Rahman, and Jennifer Henderson will read from their work.
 Antonya Nelson
Thursday, September 23, 4:00 p.m., K-State Student Union 213. Antonya Nelson, author of four collections of short stories and three novels, will read from her work.
Antonya Nelson was born in Wichita, Kansas. She attended the University of Kansas and the University of Arizona, where she received an MFA. She is the author of four short story collections: Female Trouble, Family Terrorists, In the Land of Men, and The Expendables. She is also the author of three novels: Living to Tell, Nobody’s Girl, and Talking in Bed. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook and other magazines, as wells as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. The Expendables won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990 and Talking in Bed received the 1996 Heartland Award in fiction. Her books have been New York Times notable books in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she recently was named by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”
Antonya Nelson is consistently praised for the beauty of her writing and for her exploration of the emotional terrain of women. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She divides her time between Telluride, Colorado, and Houston Texas, where she shares, with her husband novelist Robert Boswell, the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
 K.L. Cook
Tuesday, November 9, 4:00 p.m., K-State Student Union 212 K.L. Cook, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction for his collection Last Call, will read from his work.
K. L. Cook’s collection of linked stories, Last Call, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction (Univ. of Nebraska Press 2004). His stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including American Short Fiction, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, Post Road, Shenandoah, and Witness. His honors include the Grand Prize for the Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Arts series, an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship for fiction, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and residency fellowships to The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center. He teaches creative writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona, where he lives with his wife, the playwright Charissa Menefee, and their four children.
Dave Mason
Monday, November 15, 7:00 p.m., K-State Student Union 212 Dave Mason a poet and author of a collection of critical essays called The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, will read from his work.
While a student at The Colorado College in the 1970s, David Mason took a year’s leave to work in Alaska and, later, hitchhike the perimeter of the British Isles. After graduation, he worked as a gardener, housepainter, film writer, and as the Harbor Master of the Rochester (New York) Yacht Club, all the while pursuing his own goal of being a writer. It was in Rochester that he eventually received his PhD for a dissertation on W.H. Auden. After that he taught Modern British, American and Postcolonial Literatures at Moorhead State University in Minnesota. In 1998 he came home to his alma mater to teach Creative Writing and Literature.
His two prize-winning books of poems are The Buried Houses and The Country I Remember, both from Story Line Press. Chapbooks include Small Elegies and Land Without Grief. With Mark Jarman he is co-editor of Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line), and with John Frederick Nims the 4th Edition of Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry. His collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, will soon be published by Story Line. An advisory editor at The Hudson Review, he has written for many other periodicals, including Poetry, The Georgia Review, The New Criterion, The Southern Review and The Irish Times. He also has work in anthologies such as American Fiction, Poetry: A Longman Pocket Anthology, Kennedy and Gioia’s Introduction to Poetry and A Pocketful of Poesy (Ireland).
Presently he is at work on a book of memoirs about Greece, where he has lived for several extended periods, a collection of short stories set in his native Pacific Northwest, and a new book of poems. He lives in the mountains outside Colorado Springs with his wife, Anne Lennox, a photographer.
Spring 2004
Poetry on Poyntz | Julia Mickenberg | Michael Patrick Hearn | Carl Phillips | Elizabeth Grosz | Donald Hall
B. H. Fairchild | Merrill Gilfillan
Poetry on Poyntz
Friday, Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m., Strecker-Nelson Gallery, 406 1/2 Poyntz Ave. An evening of poetry readings co-sponsored by the Department of English's Creative Writing Program, this event continues the tradition of regular/occasional poetry readings at the Gallery. Readers are not limited to students; if interested in reading, please contact Jay Nelson at Strecker-Nelson Gallery, 537-2099. No admission is charged.
Julia Mickenberg
Friday, Feb. 20, 3:30 p.m., Hemisphere Room, Hale Library. Julia Mickenberg, Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, will speak on "Learning from the Left: Children's Literature and Radical Politics in the United States." Mickenberg is the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford UP, forthcoming in 2005).
 Michael Patrick Hearn
Thursday, Feb. 26, 3:30 p.m., Hemisphere Room, Hale Library. Michael Patrick Hearn, the foremost expert on L. Frank Baum, will take us "On the Road to Oz: The Making of An American Classic." Hearn is the author of The Annotated Wizard of Oz, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, and The Annotated Christmas Carol.
Carl Phillips
Thursday, March 4, 8 p.m., K-State Student Union. In connection with this year's Cultural Studies Conference, Carl Phillips will read from his poetry. He is the author of Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of Kingsely Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000); From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National Book Award; Cortege (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Morse Poetry Prize.
Elizabeth Grosz
Friday, March 5, 8 p.m., Little Theatre, K-State Student Union. In connection with this year's Cultural Studies Conference, Elizabeth Grosz will speak. The leading figure in Australian feminism, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of becoming, Elizabeth Grosz is currently professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers. Her most important books are Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994), Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (1995), and the recent Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (2001).
Donald Hall
Saturday, March 6,1 p.m., K-State Student Union 212. In connection with this year's Cultural Studies Conference, Donald Hall will speak on "Queer Bodies: Failures of Instrumentality." Hall is the Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge. His books include Queer Theories (2003), Academic Self: An Owner's Manual (2002), Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications (2001), and Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists (1996). He has also edited Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies (2001), Representing Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire (with Maria Pramaggiore, 1996), and Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (1994).
 B.H. Fairchild
Thursday, April 8, 7:30 pm, K-State Student Union 212.Poet B.H. Fairchild is author of several books, including The Arrival of the Future, Local Knowledge, The Art of the Lathe, and most recently Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (W.W. Norton). He is winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award.
 Merrill Gilfillan
Wednesday, April 21, 7:30 pm Beach Museum of Art, UMB Auditorium. Merrill Gilfillan is the author of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, including Burnt House to Paw Paw, Rivers and Birds, Chokecherry Places, Magpie Rising: Sketches of the Great Plains, and others. Gilfillan's Magpie Rising won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for nonfiction. This reading is co-sponsored by the Beach Museum of Art, the Division of Biology, the Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences program, and the Northern Flint Hills Audubon chapter.
Fall 2003
Welcome Back | John Rowell | Grant Tracey and Phil Miller | Thomas Fox Averill | Yopie Prins
Welcome Back
Friday, Sept. 5, 3:30 p.m., K-State Student Union 212. Featuring Creative Writing Faculty: Jonathan Holden (whose latest book is Knowing: New and Selected Poems), Susan Jackson Rodgers (whose short story collection The Trouble With You Is appears this fall), and Elizabeth Dodd (whose latest book is Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes). Refreshments will be served.
 John Rowell
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Friday, October 3, 3:30 p.m., K-State Student Union 212. Fiction Reading by short story author John Rowell. His first book, The Music of Your Life, was published this year by Simon and Schuster.
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"The true brilliance of John Rowell's stories is that he holds the reader perfectly suspended between hysterical laughter and unshakeable heartbreak. His vision encompasses the quirky details of everyday life as well as the biggest, darkest, unanswerable questions. If Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote ever had a love child, his name would be John Rowell. The godparents might will be Oscar Wilde and Carson McCullers. The Music of Your Life bears the blessings of that literary parentage along with a contemporary spin that places Rowell in his own wonderful orbit." -- Jill McCorkle |
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Photo credit: Christine Butler.
Grant Tracey and Phil Miller
Thursday, Oct. 23, 7:30 pm, The Dusty Bookshelf, Aggieville. Grant Tracey, a KSU alum, will read from his new collection of stories, Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe, just published by Pocol Press. The story cycle follows two parallel universes -- the United States Hockey League's Waterloo Black Hawks working to win and remain a team and the Traicheff families (past and present) strugglign to find and maintain themselves. The stories detail lives, loves, loss, sex, and family loyalties.
Philip Miller will give a reading of his poetry. Miller's poetry has appeared in many magazines and journals such as Chelsea, New Letters, The Georgia Review, and Poetry. He is author of several poetry chapbooks, including Father's Day, which won Ledge Press's 1995 Chapbook Award, and three collections: Cats in the House, Hard Freeze, and From the Temperate Zone, which he co-authored with Keith Denniston. He is on the board of The Writers Place in Kansas City, director of the Riverfront Reading Series, and editor of a magazine, The Same. His new book, forthcoming from Helicon Nine Editions, is Branches Snapping, a collection that brings together poems written over the last ten years.
Thomas Fox Averill
 Thursday, November 6, 7:30 p.m., K-State Student Union 212.
- Topeka fiction writer Thomas Fox Averill will read from his second novel, The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson, published this year by Putnam.
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"Whiskey, bagpipes, haggis and Robert Burns: Averill plops Scottish institutions into the American heartland in this meandering coming-of-age tale. In 1952, Rob MacPherson and his infant son, Ewan, emigrate from Scotland to the very Scottish town of Glasgow, Kansas, to realize Rob's dream of brewing a single-malt Scotch whiskey in America. The experiment fails horribly: the still explodes in 1963, killing a family friend and wounding Ewan. The remainder of the book is Ewan's story-his struggles with his father, his bagpipe playing and, primarily, his off-again, on-again romance with local girl Shirley Porter." -- Publishers' Weekly |
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Averill is also the author of two short story collections and another novel, Secrets of the Tsil Cafe; he makes frequent appearances on Kansas Public Radio as William Jennings Bryan Oleander.
Photo credit: Thomas Fox Averill,Washburn University (author's website).
 Yopie Prins
Thursday, November 20, 4:00 p.m., Big 12 Room, K-State Student Union. Yopie Prins, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, will speak on "Virginia Woolf and the 'Naked Cry' of Cassandra." Prins is a phenomenal scholar whose work spans Victorian Poetry and Classicism. She is author of Victorian Sappho (Princeton UP 1999); co-editor of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning: Greek Translations, Volume X (Oxford UP, 2003) and of Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (Cornell UP 1997). Prins is also co-editor and translator of The Defiant Muse: Dutch and Flemish Feminist Poems (Feminist Press, 1997).
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Department of English
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