RC Writing Alum and U-M Professor of English Laura Kasischke will participate in a live broadcast of Word Squared with T Hetzel.
Sweetland Center for Writing’s Word Squared lets you hear directly from U-M professors about their challenges, processes, and expectation as writers and also as readers of student writing. Word Squared pairs on esteemed University professor with Sweetland faculty member and WCBN Living Writers T Hetzel for a conversation about writing. These conversations offer a rare glimps into the writing that professors do outside the classroom and how they handle the same challenges student writers face.
Laura Kasischke is the Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English at U-M, where she has won a number of awards for her teaching, including the Henry Russel Award, 1923 Memorial Teaching Award, and a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.
She has published nine collections of poetry and nine novels. Her fiction has been translated into many languages, and her last four novles habe been international best-sellers. For her eighth book of poetry she received the National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Local poet Scott Beal, an award-winning U-M creative writing grad, reads from his recently published debut collection, which deploys familiar characters from Rapunzel to Perseus and whimsically surreal tall tales to explore the varied and violent forces that shape human identities. MacArthur-winning poet and former U-M English professor Alice Fulton praises Beal’s “revelatory” tales for their “surprising linguistic and narrative moves [that] elicit the unbidden traumas and dazzling weirdness of lived experience. Refreshments. Signing.
8-9 p.m., Neutral Zone, 310 E. Washington.
Children’s book author Chris Van Allsburg will give a presentation and sign in support of his latest work, The Misadventures of Sweetie-Pie.
Van Allsburg is a Michigan native and U-M alum. He is the winner of two Caldecott Medals, for Jumanji and The Polar Express, as well as the recipient of a Caldecott Honor Book for The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. He has also been awarded the Regina Medal for lifetime achievement in children’s literature. In 1982, Jumanji was nominated for a National Book Award and was made into a popular feature film, as was its sequel, Zathura. Van Allsburg was formerly an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Rhode Island with his wife and two children.
Seating will be limited. Details forthcoming from literatibookstore,com
Jon Michael Darga, a 2014 RC Creative Writing (honors) graduate, answers your questions about how to pursue a creative career in publishing.
Jon wrote his senior thesis on women and the medieval modern in The Lord of the Rings . He was happily fixated on semicolons and Oxford commas as the editor of last year’s RC Review. Interning with Midwestern Gothic literary magazine and publishing press, Jon co-created theVoices of the Middle West annual festival, organized book tours, and came to realize his love of all things publishing. After attending the Columbia Publishing Course, Jon now works as an agent’s assistant at Park Literary in New York City.ago Reader’s Pure Fiction Issue and Midwestern Gothic, among other places. He is also an editor at the Great Lakes Review where he coordinates the online Narrative Map essay project.
On November 29th, authors will volunteer at the store and talk about their favorite books! This is part of a nationwide Indies First campaign that pairs authors with indie bookstores, and we’re excited to take part.
RC Creative Writing alumna and U-M English professor Laura Kasischke, a nationally acclaimed poet and novelist, and local poet Megan Levad, the U-M Zell Writers’ Program assistant director, discuss Kasischke’s The Infinitesmals, a new collection of poems.
Talk by U-M creative writing grad Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones, a 2011 National Book Award-winning novel about a motherless family, , and the 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Her talk addresses her writing process and how her experiences growing up poor and black in the South continue to influence her work.
This local poet, an award-winning U-M creative writing grad, reads from Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems, his recently published debut collection which deploys familiar characters from Rapunzel to Perseus and whimsically surreal tall tales to explore the varied and violent forces that shape human identities. MacArthur-winning poet and former U-M English professor Alice Fulton praises Beal’s “revelatory” tales for their “surprising linguistic and narrative moves [that] elicit the unbidden traumas and dazzling weirdness of lived experience. The program begins with open mike readings.
This local poet, an award-winning U-M creative writing grad, reads from Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems, his recently published debut collection which deploys familiar characters from Rapunzel to Perseus and whimsically surreal tall tales to explore the varied and violent forces that shape human identities. The program begins with open mike readings.
Katie Hartsock is the author of a poetry chapbook, Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays, published by Toadlily Press in their 2014 Quartet Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Michigan Quarterly Review, RHINO, and Southwest Review; and in the anthology Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015). She holds a MFA from the University of Michigan and will receive a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University in summer 2015. Her full-length manuscript has been a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the New Criterion Poetry Prize.
RC Writing alumna and U-M professor Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels. Her novels include Suspicious River (1996), White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), and The Life Before Her Eyes(2002). They have been translated widely, and adapted for film. She has been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, several Pushcart Prizes, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her other collections of poetry include Space, in Chains, Lilies, Without, Gardening in the Dark, Wild Brides, Housekeeping in a Dream, Fire and Flower and What It Wasn’t. Her poems and stories have been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic , The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review and elsewhere.
Note: rescheduled from February 11
