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.
Katherine Freese‘s The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter was published in May 2014 by Princeton University Press. She earned her B.A. in Physics from Princeton University (as far as she knows, she was the second woman to major in Physics at Princeton); her M.A. in Physics in 1981 from Columbia University; and her Ph.D. in Physics in 1984 from the University of Chicago, where she was recipient of the William Rainey Harper Award Fellowship. Her first postdoctoral position was at the Harvard/ Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara and a Presidential Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. She was an Assistant Professor at MIT from 1987-1991, where she was recipient of a SLOAN Foundation Fellowship as well as an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. Then she moved to the University of Michigan where she is now the George Eugene Uhlenbeck Professor of Physics.
Fireside Stories with The RC Review
Get cozy at “Fireside Stories with the RC Review!” We’ll have an open mic where any students can (and should!) bring their own poetry, prose, and other awesome creative work to share with us. Share your love of words, support your RC community, and hear the RC’s very own Creative Writing professors read from their own amazing work! This will also be the kick-off of the grand opening of the RC Review’s submission season!
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.
Charles Baxter is U-M writer-in-residence, and a former faculty member in the U-M English MFA program. A renowned fiction writer and poet whose work has been widely anthologized, Baxter is best known for his 2000 novel, Feast of Love, a National Book Award finalist that was the inspiration for Robert Benton’s 2007 film starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear. His most recent publication, Gryphon, is a collection of short stories characterized by “the numbing tedium of a Midwestern suburb,” says Joyce Carol Oates in a New York Times review. “Baxter has been composing obituaries of a sort for his zombie Midwesterners, some of them poignant and disturbing, and all of them highly readable.”
Preceded at 5 p.m. by a reception and signing.
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.
Reading by Kathy Edgren, an award-winning local poet (and former 3-term city councilwoman) who has published 2 chapbooks, Transports and the recent Long Division.
RC Writers Tea, open to majors and current writing students who are non majors, and current students interested in the writing major. In RC’s Greene Lounge.
Reading by Tarfia Faizullah, Delbanco Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at U-M. Born in Brooklyn and raised in west Texas, she is the Pushcart Prize winning author of Seam (SIU, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Oxford American, jubilat, New England Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere, and are anthologized in Poems of Devotion, Excuse This Poem: 100 Poems for the Next Generation, The Book of Scented Things, and Best New Poets 2013. Honors include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, scholarships and fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center. She has collaborated with rapper and emcee Brooklyn Shanti, composer Jacob Cooper, and photographer Elizabeth Herman. She co-directs the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press & Video Series with Jamaal May.
