Ashland University MFA Program

Stephen Haven, Director, Ashland University MFA Program in Creative Writing and Director of the Ashland Poetry Press, will take part in three October talks and poetry readings, at the following locations: October 21, 2010 @ 7 pm A Reading from Anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out (Coffee House Press, 2010) Haven will read with Larry Smith, Ray McNiece, Maggie Anderson, and Jeanne Bryner Sponsored by Mac's Backs Books 1820 Coventry Rd Cleveland Hts, OH October 24, 2010, 4:30 pm Hudson Valley Writers' Center Poetry Reading 300 Riverside Drive, Sleepy Hollow, NY Haven will read with Afaa Michael Weaver October 25, 2010, 1:30-3:30 Binghamton University, State University of New York 4400 Vestal Parkway East Binghamton, NY LN 1104 (the Grad Student Lounge at the base of the Library Tower) . A conversation on publishing, craft, and the writing life with STEPHEN HAVEN editor at ASHLAND POETRY PRESS at Ashland University in Ohio. Haven, author of two collections o...

Bob Cowser Jr.'s is a member of the MFA faculty at Ashland University. His most recent book, Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, and a Boyhood Between is reviewed below. Review by Joan Hanna, current Ashland MFA student “I want to treat this story as a murder mystery of another kind, not as a whodunit but as a sort of ‘detective story’ ... After all, something has drawn you here. You want to know what it is the searchers seek among the ragweed and soybean plants—the tiny body, yes, but something more. Now this book lies open before you, each paragraph a stand of trees, a deep forest of wonder and darkness.” (16) This is exactly what Bob Cowser delivers to his readers in Green Fields (UNO Press) a deep forest of a story that begins on the day of Cary Ann Medlin’s disappearance. Cowser could have simply given his reader the details of how her body was discovered and the subsequent investigation, arrest and eventual execution of Robert Glen Coe 21 years later. Instead, Cowser has chos...