Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of three collections of poetry, This Strange Land(Alice James Books, April 2011), Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). A fourth book, New & Selected Poems, will be published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press in 2012. Her poems have been widely published in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel, have been reprinted in textbooks and anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and world literatures, and have been translated into Spanish and Romanian. Her personal essays appear in The Antioch Review, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, individual artist grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, and has been a Cave Canem Fellow and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
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Shara McCallum
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Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn is the author of two memoirs, The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (Norton, 2010) and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and has been translated into 13 languages. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is currently being made into a film, entitled Welcome to Suck City, starring Robert DeNiro as Flynn’s father, due for release in 2011. Flynn is also the author of three books of poetry, The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands(Graywolf, 2011), Some Ether(Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. His poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review.
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Michael Waters
Michael Waters’ ten books of poetry include Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize)—these titles from BOA Editions—Bountiful(1992); The Burden Lifters (1989); and Anniversary of the Air(1985)—these titles from Carnegie Mellon UP. In 2011, Shoestring Press (UK) published Selected Poems. His co-edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, he has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Rolling Stone, and The Pushcart Prize,and has chaired the Poetry Panel for the National Book Award. Waters is Professor of English at Monmouth University.
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Liliana Ursu
Club Rooms 107-108, Magill Commons
Liliana Ursu, internationally acclaimed Romanian poet, was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1949. Ursu has published eight books of poetry in Romanian. Her first book in English,The Sky Behind the Forest(Bloodaxe Books, 1997), translated by Ursu, Adam J. Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, became a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for Oxford’s Weidenfeld Prize.Goldsmith Market (Zephyr Press, 2004) is Liliana Ursu’s third book of poetry in Romanian, and her third book to appear in English. Lightwall will be published by Zephyr Press in 2009. Her most recent book A Path to the Sea was published in 2011
During 1992-93 and again in 1997-98, Ursu was a Fulbright Lecturer at Penn State’s University Park campus; in spring 2000 she served as a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville. In fall 2003, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry, Bucknell University. Ursu has worked for Romanian National Radio since 1980, producing a literary magazine of the air.
The reading is sponsored by Global Initiatives and The Visiting Writers Series
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Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press); Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). Her collection Thrall is due for publication in 2012. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
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Visiting Writer: Naomi Shihab Nye
Location: Pollak Theater
Naomi Shihab Nye – Poetry Reading
Admission compliments of Monmouth University
Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. She is the author and/or editor of more than 25 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). Other works include seven prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East, and What Have You Lost? Her recent collection of poems for young adults titled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. Two new books are forthcoming in winter 2012: There Is No Long Distance Now (a collection of very short stories) and Transfer (a book of poetry and prose). She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a WitterBynner Fellow (Library of Congress). Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: “The Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United States of Poetry” and also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers.
Click for more information on the Caravanserai events.
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Josh Emmons
Josh Emmons was born in Bangkok and grew up in northern California. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he published his first novel with Scribner in 2005, “The Loss of Leon Meed,” which won a Copernicus-James Michener Award and has been translated into French, Hebrew, German and Dutch. His second book, “Prescription for a Superior Existence,” came out in 2008 from Scribner, and a Turkish translation is forthcoming. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in “The American Scholar,” “The New York Times Book Review,” “McSweeney’s Quarterly,” “Details,” “People,” “FiveChapters,” “Esquire,” “The San Francisco Chronicle,” and elsewhere.
Two of his short stories have been given honorable mention in “The Best American Non-required Reading,” and he has received several fellowships to the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, NY. Emmons has taught at Grinnell College, the University of Iowa and Loyola University, and he is now an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University. He lives in Philadelphia.
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Meena Alexander
Meena Alexander considered one of the foremost Indian poets of her generation, was born in India and raised both there and in Sudan. At eighteen she went to England to study. She has published six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry: The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, Night-Scene, the Garden and in 2012 Shimla. Her poems have been translated into several languages including French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Macedonian, Arabic, Malayalam and Hindi.
She is the editor of Indian Love Poems and author of the volume of poems and short prose pieces: The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Her memoir Fault Lines was picked as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the year. Poetics of Dislocation appeared in 2009 in the Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. Her prose includes two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music and two academic studies on early English Romanticism, one of which is Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley.
Her fellowships include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Arts Council of England as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been in residence at the McDowell Colony and at Yaddo where she had the Martha Walsh Pulver Fellowship for a Poet.
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Fall Poetry Festival
The day will consist of readings by nationally known poets, some of whom will conduct poetry workshops for participants. The keynote readers will be Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn and Cave Canem Fellow Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Stephen Dunn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Different Hours. His many other books include New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994, What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009, and, most recently, Here and Now.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia, The Requited Distance, and, most recently, Mule & Pear. A photographer and painter as well as a poet, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
In addition, a dozen nationally known local poets will give brief readings: Gabe Barabas, Michael Broek, Prescott Evarts, Laura McCullough, Yesenia Montilla, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Suzanne Parker, Lauren Schmidt, Michael Paul Thomas, Michael Waters, BJ Ward, and Daniel Weeks. The festival will culminate with a reading by registered participants.
Admission to the readings is free and open to the public.
The workshops, also free, will be open to registrants only. To register, e-mail Dr. Michael Waters no later than Wednesday, November 7, at mgwaters@monmouth.edu.
Please see the schedule below for reading and workshop times. This event is co-sponsored by the Long Branch Arts Council, the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University, the Department of English at Monmouth University, and The Monmouth Review.
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9-10 a.m.
Sign-in for registrants in Bey Hall (refreshments).
The Monmouth Review distributed to participants.10-11 a.m.: Reading:
Laura McCullough / BCC
Michael Broek / BCC
Suzanne Parker / BCC
Gabe Barabas / NJ Repertory Company
Lauren Schmidt / MU
BJ Ward / Warren CC11 a.m. -12 p.m.: Workshops
12-1 p.m.: Lunch for registrants
1-2 p.m.: Reading:
Michael Paul Thomas / MU
Prescott Evarts Jr. / MU
Mihaela Moscaliuc / MU
Dan Weeks / MU
Yesenia Montilla / NYC
Michael Waters / MU2-3 p.m.: Workshops
3-4 p.m.: Reading:
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Stephen Dunn4-5 p.m.: Participants’ reading
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Mary Gaitskill
Awarding-winning author Mary Gaitskill is best known for delivering powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire with prose that “glides lightly over unsoundable depths” [Village Voice]. She is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and L.A. Times Book Award. She is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Bad Behavior, now a classic, made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and established her as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. Her newest collection of stories is titled Don’t Cry (2009):Written with her distinctive, uncanny combination of bluntness and high lyricism, Don’t Cry takes its place among artworks of great moral seriousness.” [Bomb Magazine]
Mary Gaitskill was born in 1954 in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1981 Gaitskill graduated from the University of Michigan, where she won an award for her collection of short fiction The Woman Who Knew Judo and Other Stories.