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Upcoming Readings at Ashland University

Join us for the English Department's Spring Reading series, featuring Bill Roorbach and Diana Hume George.  The Foreign Language Department is also hosting a bilingual poetry reading and bookmaking workshop with Ivan Vergara and Juan Armando Rojas Joo.

Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants
Monday, March 25, 4:30 p.m.
Schar College of Education, Room 138 (Ronk Lecture Hall)

BILL ROORBACH is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Flannery O'Connor Prize and O. Henry Prize winner Big Bend (University of Georgia Press, 2001), Into Woods (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), and Temple Stream (Random House, 2005). Life Among Giants, a novel, is due from Algonquin in 2012. The 10th anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories (Story Press, 2008), is used in writing programs around the world. Recently, Bill was a judge on Food Network All Star Challenge, evaluating incredible Life Stories cakes made under the gun, so to speak. Bill knows nothing about cake, but he knows a lot about life stories! His work has been published in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals. His story "Big Bend" was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts," read by actor James Cromwell at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Bill has taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, Colby College, and Ohio State. His last academic position was the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. He has now retired from academia in order to write full time. A comic video memoir about his tragic music career, "I Used to Play in Bands," and all kinds of other work, including a current blog on writers and writing and just about everything else (with author David Gessner) is online at www.billanddavescocktailhour.com.


Ivan Vergara and Juan Armando Rojas Joo
Tuesday, April 2, 3:30 p.m.
Schar College of Education, Room 138 (Ronk Lecture Hall)




Diana Hume George, author of Phantom Breast
Monday, April 15, 4:30 p.m.
Schar College of Education, Room 138 (Ronk Lecture Hall)

Diana Hume George is the author or editor of ten books of nonfiction and poetry, including The Lonely Other, The Family Track, A Genesis, and Phantom Breast, as well as two literary studies, Oedipus Anne and Blake and Freud. With Diane Wood Middlebrook, she’s the editor of Anne Sexton’s Selected Poetry.  George is on the faculty of Goucher College’s low-residency MFA program in Nonfiction, co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, and professor of English Emerita at Penn State at Erie.  Her personal essays and interviews have appeared in River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction, Best American Essays, and Missouri Review, among many other publications, and she’s a contributing editor of Chautauqua journal. Edinboro Book Arts will publish George’s new prose and poetry collection, Body Parts, in 2013. 

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