Sunday, July 24, 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.

2-3:30 p.m. Poetry and Creative Nonfiction Faculty Craft Seminar
“Writing About Art/Finding Art Within, or: How Giotto Painted My Poem”
with Jill Christman and Angie Estes

7 p.m. MFA Faculty Reading Schar 138
Robert Root, Steven Harvey, and Carmen Giménez Smith

About Today's Presenters:

Jill Christman

Jill Christman

Jill Christman’s memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002. Recent essays appearing in River Teeth and Harpur Palate have been honored by Pushcart nominations and her writing has been published in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Descant, Literary Mama, Mississippi Review, Wondertime, and many other journals, magazines, and anthologies. Her work has appeared on Indiana Public Radio and in anthologies, including Writer’s Digest’s Rules of Thumb, Unbuttoned: Women tell the truth about the pains, pleasures and politics of breastfeeding, and Literature: the Human Experience. She is an Associate Professor of English at Ball State University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in creative nonfiction writing in the Creative Writing program and serves as Assistant Chair of Graduate and Undergraduate Programs in the Department of English.

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.

Carmen Giménez Smith

Carmen Gimenez Smith

Carmen Giménez Smith has joined the MFA faculty in poetry. She is assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University, publisher for Noemi Press and Editor-in-Chief of Puerto del Sol. She is the author of the poetry collections Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009) and Trees Outside the Academy (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010). She also co-edited, with Kate Bernheimer, the anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (Penguin, 2010). Her work has most recently appeared in Ploughshares, jubilat, A Public Space and Denver Quarterly. She lives in New Mexico with her husband Evan Lavender-Smith and their two children.

Steven Harvey

Steven Harvey

Steven Harvey, creative nonfiction, is the author of Bound for Shady Grove (University of Georgia Press, 2000), a collection of personal essays about his experiences learning to sing and play the traditional music of the Appalachian Mountains where he lives. He is also the author of two other collections of personal essays, A Geometry of Lilies (University of South Carolina Press, 1993) and Lost in Translation (University of Georgia Press, 1997), and the editor of In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age (University of Georgia Press, 1996).


Harvey is Professor of English at Young Harris College. He received his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Virginia. He has published pieces in many magazines such as Harper's, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Fourth Genre, River Teeth and Creative Nonfiction, and has been anthologized in In Short, Life Studies, The Fourth Genre, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction and other collections. He is a former Governor's appointee to the board of the Georgia Humanities Council and a book reviewer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper.

Robert Root

Robert Root

Robert Root, creative nonfiction, is the author of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), and Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009) as well as The Nonfictionist’s Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist (University of Iowa Press, 1998). He is the editor of Landscapes With Figures: The Nonfiction of Place (Nebraska, 2007), a book of essays of place and commentaries by authors, and the co-editor of the anthology The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (Longman, 2009), now in its sixth edition. He is also the author or editor of nine other books and is the Interview/Roundtable editor for the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. A collection of his essays, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place (Nebraska) will be published in 2012.


Root has taught at Central Michigan University, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, and the Loft Writers Workshop in Minneapolis. His article “Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment,” from The Fourth Genre, is often assigned in creative nonfiction courses across the country. An essay on writing and teaching, “A Double Life,” published in Writing on the Edge, won the 2007 Donald Murray Award for Best Essay on Writing and/or Teaching.

His essays have been published in many literary journals: “Knowing Where You’ve Been,” in Ascent, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2004; “The Pattern of Life Indelible,” in Ecotone, was listed in 2007; “Postscript to a Postscript to ‘The Ring of Time’,” in The Pinch was listed in 2010, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and given the Council of Wisconsin Writers Short Nonfiction Award. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Isle Royale National Park. He lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin. His websites are http://www.rootwriting.com/ and www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root.