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 Spring 2013 semester:
February 1st and April 2013
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 2013 series:
Friday, February 1st, 7 p.m.
Tara Ison is the author of three novels: The List, A Child out of Alcatraz (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Rockaway, forthcoming in June 2013, as well as the forthcoming short story collection Ball.
to read the full bio, click here
Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Nerve.com, Black Clock, TriQuarterly, The Mississippi Review, The Santa Monica Review, Publishers Weekly, The Week, and numerous anthologies. She is also the co-writer of the cult film Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead. Ison received her MFA in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College. She has taught Fiction and Screenwriting at Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College, Antioch University, UC Riverside’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Bennington College. She is currently Assistant Professor of Fiction in Arizona State University’s creative writing program.
Friday, February 1st, 7 p.m.
Jane Miller is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Thunderbird, forthcoming in 2013 from Copper Canyon Press, and A Palace of Pearls, winner of the 2006 Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. She also has published Midnights, poetry and prose poems with visual art contributed by Beverly Pepper and an introduction by C.D. Wright. “Fear,” a chapbook from the fine arts letterpress Albion Books, excerpts a chapter from Seven Mediterraneans, a fanciful memoir-in-progress.
To read the full bio, click here
Among her earlier collections are The Greater Leisures, a National Poetry Series Selection, and August Zero, winner of the Western States Book Award. She has also written Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel, part of the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry Series. She is a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award for Poetry, as well as a Guggenheim fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. She is a professor at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.
Friday, April 5, 2013, 7 p.m.
Charles Harper Webb has published nine books of poetry, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms & Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, Amplified Dog, and Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems. Webb’s latest collection is What Things Are Made Of, from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
to read the full bio, click here
Webb's awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. His poems have appeared in many distinguished journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Poets of the New Century, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. A former professional rock musician and psychotherapist, he is the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and has been a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation, and the CSULB Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing there.
Friday, April 5, 2013 7 p.m.
Craig Johnson is the author of eight novels in the mystery series featuring Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire, which has garnered popular and critical acclaim and has been adapted for television in the hit series Longmire, now entering its second season on A&E. A ninth novel A Serpent’s Tooth will be published in April 2013.
To read the full bio, click here
The Cold Dish was an Independent Mystery Booksellers Association Dilys Award finalist and the French edition won Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/Bibliobs. Death Without Company, the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year in 2006, won France’s Le Prix 813, and Kindness Goes Unpunished, the third in the series, has also been published in France. Another Man’s Moccasins was the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award Winner and the Mountains & Plains Book of the Year, and The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Junkyard Dogswon The Watson Award for a mystery novel with the best sidekick and Hell Is Empty as well as As the Crow Flies (the eighth in the series) were New York Times bestsellers. His short story, “Old Indian Trick,” won the Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Award and appeared in Cowboys & Indians Magazine. Craig lives with his wife Judy on their ranch in Ucross, Wyoming, population 25.
About the Director - Jim Natal
Jim Natal helped found the Hassayampa Institute’s The Literary Southwest series at Yavapai College in 2008 and has served as series director since then. Prior to that he curated and co-hosted literary series and events in Los Angeles for more than 10 years.
Natal is the author of three poetry collections, Memory and Rain, Talking Back to the Rocks, and In the Bee Trees, which was a finalist for the Pen Center USA and Publisher's Marketing Association Ben Franklin Awards. A fourth collection, 52 Views, is forthcoming from Tebot Bach in spring 2013. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee (2007-2011), his poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies./p>
A former executive for the National Football League’s Creative Services Group in Los Angeles for 25 years, Natal received his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2005. With his wife, graphic designer and book artist Tania Baban, he founded Conflux Press in 2003, which specializes in custom trade books.
Meet Our Authors Featured for the Fall 2012 series:
to see the Fall 2012 author bios, click here
Friday, November 9th, 7 p.m.
K.L. Cook is the author of three award-winning books of fiction. His most recent book, Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions, 2011), a collection of thematically linked stories, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. His novel, The Girl from Charnelle (William Morrow, 2006/Harper Perennial, 2007), won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and was named a Southwest Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice selection by the Historical Novel Society. Cook’s first book, Last Call (Nebraska, 2004), a short story cycle chronicling three decades in the lives of a West Texas family, won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including Glimmer Train, One Story, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Brevity, The Louisville Review, Shenandoah, Witness, American Short Fiction, Arts & Letters, Post Road, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, and Harvard Review.
To read the full bio, click here
His work has also been anthologized in The 2012 Best American Mystery Stories, Best of the West 2011, Now Write: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, When I Was a Loser: Essays on (Barely) Surviving High School, and Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education. Cook has been awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, the 2011 Spur Award for Best Short Story set in the American West, the Grand Prize from the Santa Fe Writers Project, and residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center. Born and raised in Texas, he now lives in Prescott, Arizona, where he is a professor at Prescott College and Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. More information is available at www.klcook.com.
Friday, November 9th, 7 p.m.
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia, she completed her MFA from Old Dominion University in 2007. Her work has been published in the Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Black Renaissance Noire, and others. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2012. She lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she directs a Mojave language revitalization program, working with the last speakers of the Mojave language at Fort Mojave.
Friday, September 21st, 7 p.m.
Richard Garcia Richard Garcia is the author of three books of poetry, The Flying Garcias, Rancho Notorious, and The Persistence of Objects, as well as a bilingual children's book, My Aunt Otilia's Spirits and a chapbook of prose poems, Chickenhead. His poetry has appeared in many journals, such as The Georgia Review, Crazyhorse, The Cortland Review, and Ploughshares.
to read the full bio, click here
His work also has been included in many anthologies, among them, The Best of the Prose Poem and Best American Poetry 2005. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Mudfish Prize from Mudfish Magazine, the Greensboro Award from the Greensboro Review, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, and the Georgetown Prize from the Georgetown Review. He was poet-in-residence at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles for twelve years, where he conducted workshops in art and poetry for hospitalized children. His manuscript, The Other Odyssey, was the 2012 winner of The American Poetry Journal book prize and will be published in the fall of 2013. A collection of prose poems, The Chair, will be published by BOA Editions in 2014. He teaches at the Antioch low residency MFA Program in Los Angeles and privately online. He lives in South Carolina. You can read more about Richard's writing and teaching and link to his web publications from his website: www.richardgarcia.info.
Friday, September 21st, 7 p.m.
Naomi Hirahara was born in Pasadena, California. She received her bachelor's degree in international relations from Stanford University and later studied at the Inter-University Center for Advanced Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. She also spent three months as a volunteer work camper in Ghana, West Africa. She was a reporter for, and editor of, The Rafu Shimpo newspaper during the culmination of the redress and reparations movement for Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes during World War II.
To read the full bio, click here
Naomi has written and edited many non-fiction books relating to the Japanese American experience, but she is best known to a wider audience for her mystery novels featuring Japanese American gardener (and Hiroshima survivor), Mas Arai. Summer of the Big Bachi (Bantam/Delta, 2004) the first of the series, was a finalist for Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize, and also was nominated for a Macavity mystery award. Receiving a starred review from Publishers Weekly, Summer of the Big Bachi was included in the trade magazine's list of best books of 2004, as well as the best mystery list of the Chicago Tribune.It was followed by Gasa-Gasa Girl and Snakeskin Shamisen, which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of Best Paperback Original. The fourth Mas Arai mystery, Blood Hina, was published in March 2010 by St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne Books. She has had short stories published in a number of anthologies, including Los Angeles Noir, A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir, and The Darker Mask. In 2008 her first middle-grade book, 1001 Cranes, was released by Random House's Delacorte imprint. Naomi and her husband Wes make their home in Southern California, where she is doing research on her next mystery novel and a new children's book, as well as projects for her own small press, Midori Books.
View previous year's guest authors here
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.
Click here to view his full bio
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.
PREVIOUS 2011 EVENTS:
Friday, February 10th, 7 p.m.
Ralph Angel: 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;: 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.
Academics
- Academics Home
- Accreditation
- Degrees & Certificates
- College Catalogs
- Academic Divisions
- University Partnerships
- Instructional Support & Improvement
- Faculty Association
Contact Us
- Liberal Arts
- Prescott Campus, Building 3, Room 212C
- Office: (928) 776-2295
- Visual & Performing Arts
- Prescott Campus, Building 15, Room 102
- Office: (928) 776-2035