Tuesday, July 26, 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.

1-2:30 p.m. Craft Seminar “Dancing in a Box” with Rhina Espaillat
7 p.m. MFA Faculty Reading: Stephen Haven, Peter Trachtenberg, and Peter Campion

About Today's Presenters:

Peter Campion

Peter Campion

Peter Campion, poetry, is the author of The Lions: Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Larry Levis Reading Prize, Other People, (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Mitchell Johnson (Terrence Rogers Fine Art, 2004). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2011. He was also the 2009 recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and has held a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lecturership at Stanford University. His poetry and prose have appeared recently in The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, The New Republic, Parnassus, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Tikkun, The Yale Review and elsewhere. His monograph on the painter Joseph McNamara was published by The Seven Bridges Foundation. He has published catalog essays on such painters as Terry St. John, Kim Frohsin, Eric Aho, and Siddharth Parasnis. He won a Pushcart Prize in 2008.


Campion is the editor of the journal Literary Imagination. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota where he teaches creative writing, modern and contemporary poetry, prosody, and poetry and the visual arts.

Rhina Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat, visiting writer in poetry, was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932, has lived in the United States since 1939, and was educated in the public school system of New York City. She graduated from Hunter College and did graduate work at Queens College, also a branch of the City University of New York. Espaillat taught high school English in New York City for several years, and writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her poems, essays, narratives and translations have appeared in numerous magazines, on many websites, and in over fifty anthologies.


Espaillat has published eleven collections of her work: Lapsing to Grace (Bennett & Kitchel, 1992); Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville Press, 2001), which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; "Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word" (Oyster River Press, 2001), a bilingual chapbook that is part of a series titled Walking to Windward: 21 New England Poets; a chapbook in the Pudding House invitational series, titled "Rhina P. Espaillat: Greatest Hits, 1942 - 2001" (Pudding House Press, 2003); The Shadow I Dress In (David Robert Books, 2004), winner of the 2003 Stanzas Prize; a chapbook titled "The Story-teller's Hour" (Scienter Press, 2004); Playing at Stillness (Truman State University Press, 2005); a bilingual collection of poems and essays titled Agua de dos rios, published under the auspieces of the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture (Editora Buho, 2006); a bilingual collection of short stories titled El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (CEDIBIL, 2007); and a poetry collection titled Her Place in These Designs (Truman State University Press, 2008)

Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven, Director, has published two books of poems, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008) and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (University of New Mexico/West End Press, 2004), and one memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). For Dust and Bread, he was named 2009 Co-Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Day Association. Haven has also published a chapbook of collaborative translations from contemporary Chinese poetry, The Enemy in Defensive Positions (Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks, 2008). He is editor of The Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass: Everything Human (University of Michigan Press, 1993) and co-editor of two anthologies of contemporary poetry.


Haven's poetry and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Parnassus, Literary Imagination, Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Image, Western Humanities Review, The Missouri Review, and in many other journals. He has an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Harold Bloom. Haven has been a repeat fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, twice a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature (poetry) at universities in Beijing, and has won four individual artist grants and one residency fellowship (at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center) from the Ohio Arts Council.

Peter Trachtenberg

Peter Trachtenberg

Peter Trachtenberg, creative nonfiction, joined the MFA faculty in January 2011. He is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh (Penguin, 1998) and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little, Brown and Co., 2008). The latter book is the winner of the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Emerson Award for studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. His essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, A Public Space, and The New York Times Travel Magazine. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, a writer’s fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction. He is a 2010-11 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.