8/7/2012 - Mira Bartok, Angie Estes, Deborah Fleming, and Thomas Larson

Another full day of seminars and readings in Ashland University!  Here's what is happening today:

Today's Events:

"The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky" - Mira Bartok

1-2:30 p.m., Schar College of Education, Room 138, Ashland University

Reading by Angie Estes, Deborah Fleming, and Thomas Larson

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

Coming Tomorrow:
Peter Campion and Bob Cowser, Jr. and Student Readings

About Today's Presenters:

Mira Bartok

Mira Bartók is a visual artist, children’s book author and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, The Memory Palace, which won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, noted in The Best American Essays series and has appeared in numerous literary journals, anthologies and magazines, including Fourth Genre, Kenyon Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. Mira has also received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the American Scandinavian Foundation, Pen-American, among others. She lives in Massachusetts where she is a frequent commentator for New England Public Radio and runs Mira’s List, a website that helps artists find funding and residencies all over the world. She is currently at work on a book about the history of wonder. Angie Estes Angie Estes 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. Deborah Fleming Dr. Deborah Fleming, Professor of English at Ashland University, received her Ph.D. in 1985 from Ohio State University and is Chair of the Department and Editor of the Ashland Poetry Press. Her research interests include W. B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, Anglo-Irish Literature, Modern Poetry, and Environmentalist Literature. She is author of “A man who does not exist”: The Irish Peasant in W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge from the University of Michigan Press and articles in such journals as Jeffers Studies, Eire-Ireland, and Papers in Comparative Literature. She has published a full-length collection of poems, Morning, Winter Solstice, a chapbook of poetry, Migrations, and individual poems appear in such journals as Hiram Poetry Review, Organization and Environment, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Karamu, Cottonwood, Pennsylvania Review, and Blueline. She received the Vandewater Poetry Award from Ohio State and a fellowship from the National Endowment for Humanities, and she had been a keynote speaker at the W. B. Yeats Society of New York and the Tor House Foundation Fall Festival. Thomas Larson Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, Ohio University Press / Swallow Press, now in its third printing. He teaches, lectures, and holds workshops on memoir writing throughout the United States. Larson writes personal essays, memoir, feature articles, book reviews, and literary criticism. For the last twelve years, he has been a contributing writer for the weekly San Diego Reader where he specializes in investigative journalism, narrative nonfiction, and profiles. His writing has appeared in numerous reviews and journals, among them Tampa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, Antioch Review, Fourth Genre, Amazon.com/Shorts, the Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1997, Contrary Magazine online where he does quarterly book reviews, and New Letters where his memoir, "Mrs. Wright’s Bookshop," won the journal’s Reader’s Award for the Essay in 2008.