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Author Bios and Links:
Index: Marvin Bell, ,Michaela Carter, Laraine Herring, Sean Huze, Lori Isbell, Susan Lang, Jim Natal, Rebecca Seiferle, Peter Turchi
Marvin Bell
Marvin Bell, an elegantly impassioned critic of war, is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon Press, 2007); Rampant (2004); and Nightworks: Poems, 1962-2000 (2000). An early collection, Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Probable Volume of Dreams was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. He has also published Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews, as well as Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry with William Stafford. Bell’s honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He was on the staff of The University of Iowa's Writers Workshop for more than thirty years, where he was the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. A teacher and mentor to many of America’s finest poets, his students include former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, James Tate, Jorie Graham, Norman Dubie, David St. John, Joy Harjo, and Marilyn Chin. Beginning in 2000, Bell served two terms as the state of Iowa's first Poet Laureate. He was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1964-65.
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, Sept 11, 2008 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Michaela Carter
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Michaela Carter earned her BA from UCLA and her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She is a roster artist with the Arizona Commission on the Arts and is a resident poet at various elementary schools. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including The Southern Review, the Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, Los Angeles Review, and, most recently, Puerto Del Sol and New England Review. She lives in Prescott with her daughter Hannah and her son Max and will be teaching “Advanced Poetry” in the spring semester.
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, October 23, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Laraine Herring
Laraine Herring holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Counseling Psychology. Her stories and essays have been widely anthologized, and her non-fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Monsoons: A Collection of Writing, was published in 1999 by Duality Press. Her next book, Lost Fathers: How Women Can Heal from Adolescent Father Loss, was published in spring 2005 from Hazelden Press. Her novel, Lay My Sorrows Down, won the Barbara Deming Award for Women. Her book, Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice, was released in 2005 from Shambhala, and her follow up book The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True Voice will be released from Shambhala in August, 2010. She is currently working on two adult novels and one YA novel, and will be teaching “Introduction to Creative Writing,” “Short Story Writing,” and “Advanced Creative Nonfiction” in Spring 2010.
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, October 23, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Sean Huze
Sean Huze enlisted in the U.S. Marines on September 12th, 2001, the day after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Deployed in Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedon, he saw action in Nasiriyah and Tikrit and received numerous commendations for his service. He returned home in 2005 and began suffering symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—a condition he decided to “write his way out of” as opposed to the tragically common, self-destructive, other ways of coping. He wrote a one-act play, The Sand Storm: Stories from the Front, which dealt head-on with the realities of his war experiences. Only a short time later, Huze, a Louisiana native, was performing his play in Los Angeles and garnering national attention; The Sand Storm has since had productions around the U.S and in Europe. He has written two other acclaimed plays (The Weasel and The Wolf), completed a short film project (Homecoming), and appeared with Tommy Lee Jones in the film In the Valley of Elah. He also founded the VetStage Theater Company in Hollywood, which uses playwriting and acting to help veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, Sept. 11, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Lori Isbell
Lori Isbell, in her third year at Yavapai College, currently teaches a creative writing class in Play/Screenwriting. She received her MFA in playwriting from Arizona State University, where her first play represented the school in the American College Theatre Festival. Additionally, she has published both fiction and nonfiction, contributed to the design book Understanding USA, and authored The Teacher’s Guide for Poets & Writers Magazine. In 2006, a film she co-wrote for a student—Moonshine—debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. She is at work on a new play and will be teaching a new Creative Writing course in the spring, “Experiments in Story.”
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, October 23, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Susan Lang
Susan Lang is the author of a trilogy published by University of Nevada Press about a woman homesteading in the southwestern wilderness during the years 1929 to 1941. The first novel in the trilogy, Small Rocks Rising, won the 2003 Willa Award. Her second novel, Juniper Blue, was released in 2006 and the third, Moon Lily, in fall, 2008. Lang’s short stories and poems have been published in magazines such as Red Rock Review, Iris, and The Idaho Review. She was awarded a 2007 Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts for her novel-in-progress, The Sawtooth Complex. Presently Faculty Emeritus at Yavapai College, she founded and still directs the Southwest Writers Series at Prescott College. She was also founding director of the Hassayampa Institute. She’ll be teaching a “Fiction Workshop” at Yavapai College in the spring semester.
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, October 23, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Jim Natal
Jim Natal’s third poetry collection, Memory and Rain, was published by Red Hen Press in 2009. His first book, In the Bee Trees was a finalist for the 2000 Pen Center USA and Publisher's Marketing Association Ben Franklin Awards. A second collection, Talking Back to the Rocks, was published in 2003. His poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and 2008 and has appeared in many journals and anthologies. He earned his MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and is the co-founder of Conflux Press. He is the director of The Literary Southwest reading series at Yavapai College and will be teaching “Introduction to Poetry” there in the spring semester.
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, October 23, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Rebecca Seiferle
Rebecca Seiferle was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2004. Her fourth poetry collection, Wild Tongue, (Copper Canyon, 2007) won the Grub Street Poetry Prize for Best Poetry Collection of 2007. Her previous poetry collections have won the Western States Book Award, a Pushcart prize, the Hemley and Bogin Awards, the Writer's Exchange Award, and the National Writers' Union Prize. She has translated two book-length collections of the Spanish poetry of Cesar Vallejo, most recently The Black Heralds (Copper Canyon, 2003). Seiferle is the Founding Editor/ Publisher of the online international poetry journal, The Drunken Boat. She has been a guest poet at a number of literary conferences and festivals; her work has been translated into Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Spanish. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and teaches at The Art College in the English and Fine Arts Department.
Events Schedule
- Reading: Friday, November 13, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
Peter Turchi
Peter Turchi is the author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; and The Pirate Prince, co-written with Cape Cod treasure hunter Barry Clifford, about Clifford's discovery of the pirate ship Whydah. He has also co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Colorado Review, among other journals. "Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning," was listed as one of 100 Notable Stories of 2002 by the editors of Best American Short Stories and one of 15 Recommended Stories by the jury for the O. Henry Prize Stories and has been translated into Arabic. He has received Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 1993 through 2008 he taught fiction in and directed The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He now teaches fiction writing at Arizona State University, where he is Director of Creative Writing and Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
Events Schedule
- Prescott Public Library Companion Event: Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Prescott Public Library Founder Suite.
Topic: A lecture by Peter Turchi: Maps of the Imagination:The Writer as Cartographer. For more information, please visit the Prescott Public Library's events website. - Reading: Friday, November 13, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Susan N. Webb Community Room in the Yavapai College Library (bldg. 19)
