Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Today's Events:


All posted events are located in the Schar College of Education Ronk Lecture Hall, Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio and are free and open to the public.

1 p.m. Craft Seminar with Kathleen Norris
 
7 p.m. MFA Faculty Reading with Leila Philip, Mark Irwin, and Angie Estes
 
About the Presenters:
 
Angie Estes

Angie Estes

Angie Estes, poetry, is the author of four books, most recently Tryst (Oberlin College Press, 2009), which was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her previous book, Chez Nous, also from Oberlin, appeared in 2005. Her second book, Voice-Over (Oberlin College Press, 2002), won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and Slate, and in the anthologies Gondola Signore Gondola: Venice in 20th Century American Poetry (Supernova Edizioni, Venezia, 2007), Contemporary Poetry in the United States: A Bilingual English-Cyrillic Edition (Russia: OGI Press, 2007), Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality (Bottom Dog Press, 2006), The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001), and The Geography of Home: California and the Poetry of Place (Heyday Press, 1999). Her essays have appeared in FIELD, Lyric Poetry Review, Children’s Literature, Christianity and Literature, Little Women: Norton Critical Edition, and in Every Passing Breath: Contemporary Poets Respond to the Psalms.


The recipient of many awards, including a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the California Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ohio Arts Council. Estes received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Oregon and was for several years Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Most recently, she has taught creative writing at Oberlin College, at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at The Ohio State University. She is also a contributing editor for the literary magazine The Journal.

Mark Irwin

Mark Irwin

Mark Irwin, poetry, was born in Faribault, Minnesota, and has lived throughout the United States and abroad in France and Italy. His poetry and essays have appeared widely in many literary magazines including The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, and the New Republic. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (M.F.A.), he also holds a Ph.D. in English/Comparative Literature and has taught at a number of universities and colleges including Case Western Reserve, the University of Iowa, Ohio University, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado/Boulder, the University of Nevada, and Colorado College.


The author of six collections of poetry, including The Halo of Desire (Galileo Press, 1987), Against the Meanwhile (Wesleyan University Press, 1989), Quick, Now, Always (BOA , 1996), White City (BOA, 2000), Bright Hunger (BOA, 2004), and Tall If (New Issues, 2008), he has also translated two volumes of poetry, one from the French and one from the Romanian. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, National Endowment for the Arts, Colorado and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He lives in Colorado, and Los Angeles, where he teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California.

Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris, visiting writer in creative nonfiction, is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of The New York Times bestsellers The Cloister Walk, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and The Virgin of Bennington.


Kathleen Norris has published seven books of poetry. Her first book of poems was entitled Falling Off and was the 1971 winner of the Big Table Younger Poets Award. Soon after, she settled down in her grandparents’ home in Lemmon, South Dakota, where she lived with her husband, the poet David Dwyer, for over twenty-five years. The move was the inspiration for the first of her nonfiction books, the award-winning bestseller Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was selected as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal.

Her next book, The Cloister Walk, is structured as a diary of her monastic experience interspersed with meditations on virgin saints, Emily Dickinson, celibacy, loneliness, monogamy, and a hymnist of the early church, Ephrem of Syria. Her book Amazing Grace continues her theme that the spiritual world is rooted in the chaos of daily life. Her book, The Virgin of Bennington, is a continuous narrative in which she shares the period of her life before Dakota. Other books include Journey: New and Selected Poems, and Little Girls in Church.

Kathleen Norris is the recipient of grants from the Bush and Guggenheim Foundations. Her new book, entitled Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, was published in September 2008. It is a study of acedia, the ancient word for the spiritual side of sloth. She examines the topic in the light of theology, psychology, monastic spirituality, and her own experience.

Widowed in 2003, Kathleen Norris now resides in Hawaii, where she volunteers at her local Episcopal Church. She travels to the mainland regularly to speak to students, medical professionals, social workers, and chaplains at colleges and universities, as well as churches and teaching hospitals.
Leila Philip

Leila Philip

Leila Philip, creative nonfiction, joined the MFA faculty in January 2011. She is the author of A Family Place (SUNY, 2009) and The Road Through Miyama (Random House, 1989), which won the PEN 1990 Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction. She has received awards for her writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.