Literary Southwest Series
Featuring paired, themed readings and workshops by the Southwest's most prominent authors from diverse backgrounds who work in multiple genres.
Featuring readings for the Spring semester on
Feburary 10, 2012, April 13, 2012,
and April 26, 2012
Literary Southwest Series presents:
Time & location: 7:00pm in the Susan N. Webb Community Room (bldg.. 19, rm. 147), Yavapai College Library
Meet Our Authors Featured for the Spring 2012 series:
Friday, April 13th, 7 p.m.
An Evening With Mark Doty: One of America's finest poets; awards include the National Book Award in poetry in 2008, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among many others.
Mark Doty Biography
Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of seven books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005).Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published, and won the National Book Award, in 2008. Doty is the author of three memoirs: Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007), as well as The Art of Description: World Into Word, a volume in the popular "Art of" series, a line of books intended to reinvigorate the practice of craft and criticism. His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” (2001). In addition to the National Book Award, Doty has also received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. Doty teaches at Rutgers University, and is a frequent guest at Columbia University, Hunter College, and NYU.
Hassayampa Institute Presents:
A Reading by Yavapai College Creative Writing Students:
Thursday, April 26th at 6:00 p.m. in the Susan N. Webb Community Room (bldg.. 19, rm. 147) at Yavapai College Library.
PREVIOUS 2011 EVENTS:
Friday, February 10th, 7 p.m.
Ralph Angel: A remarkable poet and translator of Lorca; recently won a Pushcart Prize, and awards from the Academy of American Poets, PEN USA, Poetry Magazine, and the Fulbright Foundation.
Click here to view his full bio
Ralph Angel is the author of five books of poetry: Your Moon (forthcoming); Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 (2007 PEN USA Poetry Award); Twice Removed; Neither World (James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets); and Anxious Latitudes; as well as a translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song. His poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad. Recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award, the Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. He currently serves as Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and is a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.
Manuel Muñoz; An amazing up-and-coming fiction writer; winner of the Whiting and O'Henry Awards
Click here to view his full bio
Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories: The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2007, and Zigzagger, published by Northwestern University Press in 2003. His first novel, What You See in the Dark, was published by Algonquin Books in 2011 and will appear in paperback in spring 2012. A recipient of a Whiting Writers Award in 2008, he was a finalist for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize and the recipient of a Constance Saltonstall Foundation Individual Artist's Grant in Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2009 O.Henry Prize for a short story. He served as a juror for the O.Henry Prize in 2011. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer T rain, Edinburgh Review, and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. A native of Dinuba, California, he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona at Tucson.
Thursday, December 1st: “Examined Life”
Kim Addonizio
Click here to view her full bio
Kim Addonizio is the author of five collections of poetry including Tell Me, a 2000 National Book Award Finalist, What Is this Thing Called Love (W.W. Norton, 2004), and, her most recent, Lucifer at the Starlite (W.W. Norton, 2009). Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award, and other honors. She has published two instructional books: Ordinary Genius, A Guide for the Poet Within; and The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (with Dorianne Laux).
She has a word/music CD with Susan Browne, “Swearing, Smoking, Drinking & Kissing,” available from CDBaby. Addonizio’s other books include two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street; and a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure. With Cheryl Dumesnil, she co-edited Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. She lives in Oakland, California.
Steve Heller
Click here to view his full bio
Steve Heller grew up on a small acreage in the Oklahoma wheat country, the setting of his novel The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, originally published by Chelsea Green and subsequently reprinted by Anchor/Doubleday. Lucky Kellerman was a selection of both Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club, and also received the Friends of American Writers First Prize Award for the best published book of fiction or nonfiction related to the Midwest. His second novel, Father's Mechanical Universe, was published in 2001 by BkMk Press. Heller’s most recent book, What We Choose to Remember (Serving House Press, 2009), is a collection of narrative essays about the relationship between memory and imagination in the act of storytelling. Winner of many distinctions for his short fiction and creative nonfiction, Heller’s short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and national anthologies, and twice have received O. Henry Awards.
He has also received an Individual Fellowship Grant in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of Heller’s stories have been set in Hawaii`i, where he has lived for several extended periods. His first collection, The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers (Chariton Review Press), has been called “a Hawaiian Winesburg, Ohio.” Hawaii`i is also the focus of his most recent fictions, including stories in Nebraska Review, Bamboo Ridge, South Dakota Review, Spirit of Aloha, and A.I.M.: America's Intercultural Magazine.
Heller's creative nonfiction has appeared in such publications as Manoa, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review, New Letters, American Cowboy, and In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, from W. W. Norton. Heller is working on a new novel called Return of the Ghost Killer and a collection of new and selected stories about Hawaii`i called Private Island. He teaches at Antioch University Los Angeles, where he is Professor and Chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. He also serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and as a “New Voices” mentor for PEN USA. Heller lives in Culver City, California.
October 21st: An Evening with Yavapai College Creative Writing Faculty: Michaela Carter, Laraine Herring, Lori Isbell, Susan Lang and Terence Pratt
Friday, September 23rd: “Spirit Memory”
Alison Hawthorne Deming: Click here to view her bio
(the great-great granddaughter of esteemed American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne) was born and grew up in Connecticut. She is the author of Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three additional poetry books: The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU Press, 1997); Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005); and her most recent poetry collection Rope (Penguin, 2009). Deming has also published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996), The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), which was a finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (Milkweed Editions 2001). She also edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed, 2002). Her poems and essays have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Orion, American Nature Writing, and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. Deming received an MFA from Vermont College and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her writing has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, a Pushcart Prize, the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Bayer Award in science writing from Creative Nonfiction. She has held residencies at Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. She has served on the faculty of Prague Summer Seminars, Writers at Work, Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, Art of the Wild, and many other writing programs, and was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaii'i. She is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.
Sean Nevin: Click here to view his bio
is currently serving as interim director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU. He is the author of Oblivio Gate, selected for the Crab Orchard Award Series First Book Prize (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press 2005). He directs OYP's Young Writers Program and is editor of 22Across: A Review of Young Writers. His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry selected by Robert Pinsky, the Alsop Review Poetry Prize, the Katherine C. Turner Academy of American Poets University Prize, and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including The Gettysburg Review and North American Review, and in anthologies including Family Matters: Poems of Our Families and Beyond Forgetting: Prose and Poetry about Alzheimer's Disease, as well as the anthology from the Academy of American Poets, New Voices: University and College Prizes 1998-2008. His poetry and interviews have recently been featured on NPR's nationally syndicated shows The Story and Speaking of Faith.
About the Director - Jim Natal
Jim Natal is the director of the Hassayampa Institute’s Literary Southwest series and teaches creative writing at Yavapai College’s Prescott Valley campus.
He is the author of two poetry collections, In the Bee Trees and Talking Back to the Rocks. A third collection, Memory and Rain, will be published by Red Hen Press in early 2009. His poetry was nominated for a 2007 Pushcart Prize and has been published, reviewed, or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies.
A former executive for the National Football League’s Creative Services Group, he also curated poetry series for 10 years at a number of Los Angeles venues. In 2004, with his wife, book artist Tania Baban, he co-founded Conflux Press, which specializes in custom trade books, handmade chapbooks, and artist’s books.
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