8/5/2012 - Peter Campion, Jill Christman, Bob Cowser Jr., and Sarah M. Wells

Welcome to Week Two of the Ashland University MFA Program Summer Residency!

Today's Events:

Reading by Peter Campion, Jill Christman, Bob Cowser, Jr., and Sarah M. Wells

7 p.m., Schar College of Education, Room 138, Ashland University

Coming Tomorrow:
Mira Bartok, Joe Mackall, and Sarah M. Wells

About Today's Presenters:

Peter Campion

Peter Campion 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 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  University of Minnesota.

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.

Bob Cowser, Jr.

Bob Cowser, Jr. is the author of three works of literary nonfiction and editor of a fourth. His most recent, Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, and a Boyhood Between, was published as part of the Engaged Writers Series at the University of New Orleans Press in 2010. A Professor of English at St. Lawrence University and on the faculty of the Low-Residency MFA at Ashland University, Cowser's essays and reviews have appeared widely in literary magazines and journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and The Huffington Post. He lives on the Grasse River in Canton, NY with his wife Candace and their sons Jackson and Mason.

Sarah M. Wells

Sarah M. Wells is the author of Pruning Burning Bushes from Wipf and Stock Publishers (2012), and a chapbook of poems, Acquiesce, winner of the 2008 Starting Gate Award through Finishing Line Press (2009). Poems by Wells have appeared or are forthcoming in Alimentum, Ascent, Christianity & Literature, JAMA, Literary Mama, Measure, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Puerto del Sol, Rock & Sling, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published by Ascent and River Teeth.

Sarah's poetry has been honored with two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her essay in Ascent, "Those Summers, These Days" was listed as a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2012. She has received scholarships to attend the Key West Literary Seminar and West Chester Poetry Conferences.

Sarah serves as the Administrative Director for the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University and Managing Editor for the Ashland Poetry Press and River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. She lives in Ashland, Ohio with her husband, Brandon, and their three children, Lydia, Elvis, and Henry.