Writing Now, Reading Now

Wichita State University Reading Series 2012-13

Sponsored by Department of English~Ulrich Museum~
University Libraries~Watermark Books & Café~Women’s Studies

Wednesday, September 19th
6:30 p.m.   
Ulrich Museum

Fiction Reading
K.L. Cook

K.L. Cook’s newest book Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions 2011) won the Spokane Prize for short fiction. His novel The Girl from Charnelle was an editor’s choice selection from the Historical Novel Society, a Southwest Book of the Year, and took the Willa Award for contemporary fiction.  His first book Last Call won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction.  He is the 2012 WSU Visiting Distinguished Writer. 

"Language is a finding-place not a hiding place."

                      --Jeanette Winterson
 

Monday, October 1st 
5:30 p.m.   
Ulrich Museum

Fiction Reading
Pam Houston

Pam Houston’s story “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” was picked by John Updike for Best American Short Stories of the Century.  She’s the author of the 2012 novel Contents May Have Shifted, as well as Cowboys Are My Weakness, Sight Hound, Waltzing the Cat, and essays collected in A Little More About Me.  Her stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards, and, among other honors, her longer work received the Willa Award for contemporary fiction.

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

--Franz Kafka
 

Thursday, November 1st 
5:00 p.m.   
Ablah Library

Poetry Reading
Susan Briante and Philip Pardi

Susan Briante’s 2011 poetry collection, Utopia Minus was praised in Publisher’s Weekly as a book which “finds an urgent language for the world in which we live.”  Briante’s first book was Pioneers in the Study of Motion.  Her poems have appeared in more than 50 journals including New American Writing, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares.  Philip Pardi’s Meditations on Rising and Falling won the 2008 Brittingham Poetry Prize and the Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Prize. His poems and translations have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, Seneca Review, and Translation Review, and been reprinted in Best New Poets, Introduction to the Prose Poem, and Is This Forever or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas.

"Literature is news that stays news."

--Ezra Pound

Tuesday, February 26th 
5:30 p.m.   
Ulrich Museum

Poetry Reading
Malena Mörling

Malena Mörling, the 2013 WSU Visiting Distinguished Poet, is the author of Ocean Avenue, winner of the 1998 New Issues Press Poetry Prize, and Astoria (Pittsburgh Press 2006) and has translated poems by the 2011 Nobel Prize winning Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.  Among many honors, she’s won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.  Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Washington Post Book World, Double Take/Points of Entry and Five Points.

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences too."

--Walt Whitman

Sunday, April 7th  
2:00 p.m.   
Ablah Library

Fiction & Poetry Reading
2013 MFA Graduates

Now in its 38th year, the Wichita State MFA program celebrates the fiction and poetry written by its class of 2013, a group of students drawn from all over the country. 
 

Wednesday, May 1  
5:30 p.m.   
Ulrich Museum

Poetry Reading
Craig Blais

Craig Blais’s 2012 collection About Crows was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and National Poetry Series and selected by Terrance Hayes for the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry by the University of Wisconsin Press.  His poetry has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellingham Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. About Crows was written at Wichita State for his MFA final project.

"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."

--Sigmund Freud