U-M English MFA Program: MFA Events Calendar

MFA Events Calendar

Donald Hall, Day With(out) Art Lecture
Tuesday, December 01, 2009

In a review of Hall's recent Selected Poems, Billy Collins wrote in the Washington Post: "Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet... It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines." Donald Hall has published numerous books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (2006); The Painted Bed (2002) and Without: Poems (1998), which was published on the third anniversary of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia. Other notable collections include The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination; The Happy Man (1986), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Exiles and Marriages (1955), which was the Academy's Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956. He has also received numerous awards including two Guggenheims.

Since the first Day With(out) Art on December 1, 1989, it has grown into an international collaboration in which thousands of organizations acknowledge the devastating toll that HIV and AIDS have taken on the world wide creative and performing arts communities. As a museum devoted to fostering and presenting creative expression and to preserving cultural memory, UMMA has long been committed to participation in this worldwide event.

This program is cosponsored by UMMA and the MFA in Creative Writing Program of the UM Department of English.

Time: 5:15PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/programs-and-tours/zell.html
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu

Tracy Daugherty and Marjorie Sandor Reading
Thursday, December 03, 2009

Marjorie Sandor is the author of two story collections—Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime and A Night of Music—and a memoir, The Night Gardener: A Search For Home. She has published work in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review and The New York Times Magazine, and her writing has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Fiction, the Oregon Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award.

Tracy Daugherty is the author of Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, the short story collections It Takes a Worried Man and The Woman in the Oil Field, and the novels The Boy Orator, What Falls Away and Desire Provoked. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Georgia Review, and he has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Once a student of Donald Barthelme's, he is now Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University.

Time: 5:15PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Website: https://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaeve.asp
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu

Uwem Akpan fiction reading
Friday, December 04, 2009

Sponsored by the University Library, the MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, Humanities Institute, Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, and Ann Arbor Book Festival

Time: 4:00PM
Location: Library Gallery, Room 100, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library
Website: https://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/eventsCalendar.asp
Contact: evansy@umich.edu

Webster Reading: Brad Wetherell (prose), Amy Berkowitz (poetry)
Friday, December 04, 2009

This event is free and open to the public.

Time: 7:00PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Website: https://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/webster.asp
Contact: emilymcl@umich.edu

Piotr Sommer Poetry Reading
Monday, December 07, 2009

Piotr Sommer is a poet, translator, anthology editor and essayist. Born in 1948, he grew up in Otwock, a small town outside of Warsaw, studied English at the University of Warsaw, and now edits Literatura na Świecie (literature in the world), a Polish magazine of international writing. He taught poetry at several American universities, including Amherst College, Wesleyan University, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and University of Richmond, Virginia, has been awarded several prizes and fellowships, and has published twelve books of poetry in Polish (including Pamiątki po nas, Kolejny świat, Czynnik liryczny, Nowe stosunki wyrazów, Piosenka pasterska, Rano na ziemi. Wiersze z lat 1968 – 1998, Dni i noce and Wiersze ze słów) as well as two books of essays on poetry and translation (Smak detalu i inne ogólniki and Po stykach). He is also the author of numerous translations from American, English and Irish poetry, and has had two collections published in translation: Things to Translate and Other Poems, and Ein freier Tag in April, which have appeared in German, Slovak, Slovenian, and English.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and the Copernicus Endowment.

Time: 5:15PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Website: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu

Andrei Codrescu: Politics of Writing Lecture
Wednesday, December 09, 2009

“How to Make a Revolution: A Guide to Romania’s Fin-de-Siècle Media Spectacle as Performed by a Dying Regime, a Willing Populace, and the International Press Corps.”

About his lecture, Andrei Codrescu writes, “I covered the events in Romania in 1989-1990 for NPR and ABC News, and I documented the return to my native country in The Hole in the Flag: an Exile's Story of Return & Revolution (Morrow 1991, Avon 1992). I have returned numerous times since and I started writing in Romanian again, picking up the thread severed at age 19 in 1965. Now, twenty years after the coup, or “revolution” that ended in the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Romania is a different country, a member of the European Union, and an ardent convert to capitalism. My talk will focus on reality and appearances in Romania, and the role of the media, of which I am a part, in shaping the images of the “revolution” and those of the new Romania.”

Andrei Codrescu’s career spans four decades as novelist, poet, journalist, filmmaker, commentator, and educator. His work has been distinguished with numerous awards, including the Peabody Award and the Pushcart Prize. He was MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until 2009, and continues to edit Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Life and Letters, an online journal he founded at LSU in 1983. His most recent book is The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess (Princeton 2009).

Sponsored by CREES, Avant Garde Interest Group, CES-EUC, the Department of English, and the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Time: 7:00PM
Location: Rackham Auditorium
Website: http://www.ii.umich.edu/ces-euc/events
Contact: crees@umich.edu

Carol Ann Duffy In Residence (poetry reading)
Monday, January 11, 2010

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, England, where she is Professor and Creative Director of The Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. In 2005, she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Rapture. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Great Britain in 2009.

A public reception in the UMMA Commons will immediately follow the reading.

Time: 5:15PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Website: https://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaeve.asp
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu

Carol Ann Duffy In Residence (lecture)
Thursday, January 14, 2010

Time: 5:15PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Website: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaeve.asp
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu

Amina Gautier fiction reading
Thursday, January 21, 2010

Amina Gautier has published over fifty short stories, which have appeared or are forthcoming in Antioch Review, Callaloo, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Southern Review, and Storyquarterly, among other literary journals. Her work has been anthologized in The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction, Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years, Best African American Fiction: 2009, Voices, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008 and is forthcoming in Best African American Fiction: 2010. She has also served as a fiction editor for Storyquarterly. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, and is currently writing a monograph on Charles W. Chesnutt and the politics of gender.

Time: 5:15PM
Location: 3222 Angell Hall
Website: https://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/eventsCalendar.asp
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu

Cole Swensen poetry reading
Thursday, January 28, 2010

Cole Swensen is the author of twelve books of poetry; the most recent is Ours (U. of California, 2008), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Other volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, Sun & Moon's New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series. She is also the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology American Hybrid and a translator of French poetry, prose, and art criticism. Her translation of Jean Fremon's Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN Award in Literary Translation, and she has received grants from the Association Beaumarchais and the French Centre du Livre. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Swensen teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Time: 5:15PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Website: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaeve.asp
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu

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