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Reading Series

Spring 2011 Reading Series
Creative Writing Program | Iron Horse Literary Review

All Readings are at 7:30 pm, in English 001

September 22 | Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea’s ninth book of poetry is Young of the Year  (Four Way Books, 2011).  His book Pursuit of a Wound was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; another volume, To the Bone won the Poets’ Prize.  He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Foundations, and has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in major literary journals as well as magazines ranging from The New Yorker to Sports Illustrated.  He is the founding editor of The New England Review, and has taught at Yale, Middlebury, Wesleyan, and Dartmouth.  His other work includes chairing a leadership committee of a campaign that conserved 350,000 acres of wilderness in northern Maine, and serving as Vice-President of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education

October 20 | Aracelis Girmay

Winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Award, Aracelis Girmay is the author of Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011). She was born and raised in Southern California, with roots in Puerto Rico, Eritrea, and African America. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and the poetry collection Teeth, for which she was awarded a GCLA New Writers Award. Girmay has taught youth writing workshops in schools and community centers for the past ten years. She is assistant professor of poetry writing at Hampshire College, and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University. Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member.

November 10 | Christine Kitano

Christine Kitano’s first book of poems, Birds of Paradise, was published in 2011 by Lynx House Press.  A native of Los Angeles, she earned a B.A. from the University of California, Riverside and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.  Recent poems have appeared in the journals Spillway and The Arroyo Literary Review, and the anthology Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees.

November 10 | Jessicca Daigle Martin

Jessicca Daigle Martin’s poetry chapbook is Always After Our Fall (Southeast Missouri State Press, 2011).  Her poems have appeared recently in Redivider, So to Speak, Christianity & Literature, CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine, and others. She was the winner of So to Speak’s Winter/Spring 2009 Creative Nonfiction Contest, and finalist in Arts & Letters’ 2010 Poetry Award, and Ruminate Magazine’s 2010 Poetry Award. She has been a writing fellow at the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts.

November 10 | Ruben Quesada

Ruben Quesada's first book of poems is Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011). He holds an MFA from University of California, Riverside. His poems and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Rattle, Stand Magazine (U.K.), Southern California Review, and Third Coast. His awards include residencies at Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Lambda Literary Foundation Retreat, Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Napa Valley Writers' Conference.

February 10 | David Dow

David R. Dow is an internationally recognized figure in the fight against the death penalty and has represented more than 100 death-row inmates over the past two decades. He is the University Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston Law Center as well as the founder and current director of the Texas Innocence Network, an organization that uses UH law students to investigate claims of actual innocence brought by Texas prisoners. He is also the litigation director at the Texas Defender Service (a nonprofit law firm that represents death row inmates and works to reform the judicial system). Dow has published numerous books on judicial reform and the death penalty, including Executed on a Technicality, America’s Prophets: How Judicial Activism Makes America Great, and most recently, Autobiography of an Execution. He is also the co-editor of Machinery of Death: The Reality of America’s Death Penalty Regime.
Sponsored by Iron Horse Literary Review

February 17 | Laura Furman

Laura Furman's new story collection, The Mother Who Stayed, has just been published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster.  She has been the series editor for The O.Henry Prize Stories since 2003; among her own books are the novels Tuxedo Park and The Shadow Line, the short story collections Drinking with the Cook  and Watch Time Fly, the memoir Ordinary Paradise, and the anthology Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading (edited with Elinore Standard).  She is widely published in periodicals ranging from Subtropics and Southwest Review to The New Yorker, and is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Laura Furman is the Susan Taylor McDaniel Professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin.
Sponsored by Contemporary Authors Reading Series

April 7 | Alberto Rios (poet)

Alberto Álvaro Ríos is the author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona border.  His books of poems include The Dangerous Shirt, The Theater of Night, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, The Lime Orchard Woman, The Warrington Poems, Five Indiscretions, and Whispering to Fool the Wind.  Besides being a finalist for the National Book Award, Ríos has garnered numerous other prizes, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award, PEN/Beyond Margins Award, the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, and six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction. Ríos is a Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, where he has taught for over 27 years and holds the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English.
Sponsored by Iron Horse Literary Review

April 14 | Rebecca Dunham

Rebecca Dunham is the author of two books of poetry: The Flight Cage, published in 2010 by Tupelo Press, and The Miniature Room, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was published by Truman State University Press in 2006.  Her poems have appeared in FIELD, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, The Indiana Review, and AGNI; she has also been awarded a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She teaches in the doctoral creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Sponsored by Contemporary Authors Reading Series