Master of Fine Arts

Readings for 2007 - 2008

 

READINGS FOR FALL 2007

September 19th, Wednesday, 7 PM, A Double bill, 2 short story writers of national fame will read in the Gallery 210. The distinguished guests are Jaimee Wriston Colbert and Gladys Swan.

JAIMEE WRISTON COLBERT is the 1997 Willa Cather Award winner in fiction, a national competition, and her novel in stories, Climbing the God Tree, was published by Helicon Nine Editions in 1998. Her first book, the short stories collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, won the Zephyr Prize in fiction and was published in 1994. A new collection, the stories cycle Dream Lives of Butterflies, is forthcoming from BkMk (Bookmark Press of the University of Missouri, Kansas City) September 7, 2007. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, broadcast on "Selected Shorts," performed live throughout Maine by PCA Great Performances, and have twice been finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including: TriQuarterly, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Tampa Review, Connecticut Review, Louisiana Literature, Green Mountains Review, Tiferet, Snake Nation Review, Long Shot, Natural Bridge, Pacific Coast Journal, Chaminade Literary Review, F Magazine, Harpur Palate, the anthology Ohio Short Fiction, and the anthology Peculiar Pilgrims from Hourglass Press. She was selected as a reader for the 2007 Boston Fiction Festival, and her story was published in their accompanying journal, the Boston Literary Review. Originally from Hawaii, Colbert is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University.

GLADYS SWAN is the author of six volumes of short fiction and two novels. Her novels are Carnival of the Gods and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices. Her most recent book is the collection A Garden Amid Fires from BkMk Press in 2007. She has received the Tate Prize for Poetry and the Lawrence Foundation Award for Fiction. She has taught crative writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and at Vermont Collegeís MFA Program.

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October 17th, Wednesday, 7 PM, the prolific and award winning poet Jeff Friedman will be reading from his work in Gallery 210. Jeff Friedman is the author of four collections of poetry: Black Threads (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007), Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998) and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986). His poems and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, 5 AM, New England Review, Forward, Maggid, Poetry East, Literary Imagination, Agni Online, Natural Bridge, North American Review and The New Republic. He is a core faculty member in the M.F.A. program in Poetry Writing at New England College.

Tues. November 6, 12:30-1:45PM, SSB 331. Daniel Tobin, editor of the Book Of Irish American Poetry, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, will discuss his anthology and Irish American Poetry. Tobin is chair of the Writing and Publishing Program at Emerson College and the author of four collections of poetry.

November 7th, Wedensday, (nearly) local novelist and editor Valerie Vogrin will be reading from her work in Lucas Hall 493, 7 PM. Valerie Vogrin’s first novel, Shebang, was published in 2003 by University Press of Mississippi. Her chapter on point of view appeared in Gotham Writers’Workshop Guide to Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2003). Her stories have appeared in journals such as Black Warrior Review and New Orleans Review and, most recently, in The Florida Review. She is Assistant Professor of English at SIUE and is the prose editor of Sou’wester magazine.

Nov. 13th, Tuesday, 12:30, Jane Ellen Ibur will be reading and visiting Jaime Wood's beginning poetry class in Clark Hall 305.

December 14th, Friday, A Reading by graduating MFA fiction writers and poets, in the E. Desmond and Mary Ann Lee Theater of the Touhill Performing Arts Center, UMSL, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO, 63121, 7:30-10:00 PM. The readers will be George Fortier, Andie Jackson, Olivia Ayes, Capuchina Taylor, Andrew Pryor, Brad Lyons, and Joanne Drew. There will be a party with food and cash bar. The event is free and open to the public. Contact 314-516-5590 or visit www.touhill.org.

 

READINGS FOR WINTER 2008

Thursday. Feb 14, 12:30-1:45PM, SSB 331: Irish American Women Writers. Sally Ebestof UMSL and Erin McGraw of Ohio State will launch Sally Ebest's Too Smart to Be Sentimental, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2007. A talk by Sally Ebest and a reading by Erin McGraw. This event is sponsored and funded by the Smurfit-Stone Professorship.

Feb 14th, Thursday, A Reading by Fiction Writer and Essayist Erin McGraw, Room 450 Lucas Hall, UM-St. Louis, One University Blvd., Saint Louis, MO, 63121, 7:00 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Contact: 314-516-5590. Erin McGraw is the author of four books of fiction. A new novel, The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, will be published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2008. McGraw's stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Good Housekeeping, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and magazines. She has received fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, Stanford University, and the MacDowell and Yaddo Corporations. She teaches creative writing at the Ohio State University. This event is sponsored and funded by the Smurfit-Stone Professorship.

February 16th, Saturday, A Faculty Reading and Celebration for the 10th Anniversary of UMSL’s MFA program, in the E. Desmond and Mary Ann Lee Theater of the Touhill Performing Arts Center, UMSL, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO, 63121, 7:00 PM.The readers will be John Dalton, Steve Schreiner, Howard Schwartz, Nanora Sweet, Mary Troy, and Eamonn Wall. There will be a party with food and cash bar. The event is free and open to the public. Contact 314-516-5590 or visit www.touhill.org.

March 19th, Wednesday, Reading by Kent Shaw and Marjorie Stelmach, Gallery 210, UMSL, 44 E. Drive, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121. At 7 PM. This event is free and open to the public. Contact: 314-516-5590. Kent Shaw has received degrees from University of Missouri -St. Louis, Washington University, and he is currently a PhD candidate at University of Houston. His first book Calenture was published this year by University of Tampa Press. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from AGNI, Third Coast, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and other journals. Marjorie Stelmach’s first book,Night Drawings (Helicon Nine Editions), was selected by David Ignatow to receive the 1994 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize. A second volume of poems, A History of Disappearance was published in October, 2006, by the University of Tampa Press. She directs the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholars Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Wednesday, April 2nd, Room 450 Lucas hall, 7:00 PM, Geoff Schmidt: a Reading and Discussion. Geoff Schmidt is an Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama. He's the author of a novel, Write Your Heart Out: Advice From the Moon Winx Motel (Smallmouth Press), and has published almost two dozen stories, most recently in Fiction, Crab Orchard Review, River Styx, and The Idaho Review. He has a story forthcoming in Esquire. 

Thurs, April 3, 12:30-1:45 PM, SSB 331. A reading by two Irish American poets--Knute Skinner and Ray McManus. Skinner is a St. Louis native whose Collected Poems have just been published by Salmon Publishing in Ireland. He is the founding editor of theBellingham Review. McManus is native of South Carolina whose first collection has recently been published.

April 11th, Friday, A Reading by graduating MFA fiction writers and poets, in the E. Desmond and Mary Ann Lee Theater of the Touhill Performing Arts Center, UMSL, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO, 63121, 7:30-10:00 PM. The readers will be Lara Schrage, Serena Muhammad, Rewa, Corinna Estep, Katie Spillman, and Jim Goodman. There will be a party with food and cash bar. The event is free and open to the public. Contact 314-516-5590 or visit www.touhill.org.

April 30th, Wednesday, Sally Van Doren, winner of the 2007 Walt Whitman Award, will read from her new book SEX AT NOON TAXES, Gallery 210, UMSL, 44 E. Drive, One University Blvd., 63121, 7:00 PM. Free and open to the public. Contact 314-516-5590.
Sally Van Doren was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, LIT, Margie, Parthenon West Review, Poetry Daily, and Pool. She is a graduate of Princeton University and received an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She was a semi-finalist in the 2006 "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Contest. Her poem, "The Sense Series," was the text for a multi-media performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in February 2007. She teaches for Springboard to Learning in the St. Louis Public Schools and curates the Sunday Poetry Workshops for the St. Louis Poetry Center. She divides her time between St. Louis and Cornwall, Connecticut.