All readings are held in the main Floor rotunda of the Valley
Library at 7:30p.m. unless otherwise noted.
They are free and open to the public.
(Sponsored by the OSU English Department, the Valley Library, and
the Provost's Office)
Jason BrownFriday, October 17
Short-story writer Jason Brown is the first in this year's Visiting Writer's Series. His story collection, Driving the Heart and Other Stories, was published by W.W. Norton in 1999, by Jonathon Cape in 2000, and by Vintage in 2001. His second book of stories, Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work, appeared in November of 2007 from Open City/Grove Atlantic. Individual stories from both collections have appeared in Best American Short Stories, TriQuarterly, Story, The Atlantic, Harper's, KGB Anthology, and Selected Shorts on National Public Radio. He teaches in the MFA Program at University of Arizona.
Friday, November 21
V. Penelope Pelizzon's first poetry collection, Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000), won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America's 2001 Norma Farber First Book Award. Other honors include a Discovery/The Nation Award, The Kenneth Rexroth Translation Award (for Umberto Saba's poems from Italian), and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, 32 Poems, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New England Review, and elsewhere. Poems from her manuscript in progress, The Monongahela Book of Hours, have been published in Field and The Missouri Review. She is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of Creative Writing at The University of Connecticut.
Averill CurdyFriday, November 21
Averill Curdy
earned an M.F.A. at the University of Houston and her PhD at the University of
Missouri. She is the co-editor of the Longman Anthology of Poetry
(December, 2005), and her poems and translations have appeared in Poetry,
The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Slate, Western
Humanities Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is the
2005 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship for emerging women
writers, of a Pushcart Prize in 2006, and of both a Literature Fellowship from
the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fellowship in Poetry from the
Illinois Council for the Arts in 2007. She teaches poetry as Artist in
Residence at Northwestern University.
Friday, November 21
Jeffrey Thomson's third book of poems, Renovation, was part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press (CMU) poetry series in 2005. His second collection of poems, The Country of Lost Sons, inaugurated a new poetry series from Parlor Press at Purdue University in February 2004, and his first book, The Halo Brace, was brought out in a limited edition letterpress version from Birch Brook Press in 1998. Winner of recent fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine, Farmington. Forthcoming in 2009 are 3 new books: his fourth collection of poems, Birdwatching in Wartime (CMU Press), a collection of poems translated from the Spanish of Juan Carlos Flores, Many Ways to Dig a Tunnel (Green Integer), and an edited anthology (From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great).
Bill GuttentagThurdsday, February 5, LaSells Stewart Center Contruction & Engineering Auditorium
The popularity of documentary films has exploded over recent years, bringing new interest to the art and technique of telling true stories for the screen. Academy Award winning filmmaker Bill Guttentag will take us inside this world, drawing on his experiences from directing films and television programming on subjects as diverse as the Rape of Nanking (Nanking/THINKFilm), the legal system (Law & Order: Crime & Punishment, NBC) and music and the civil rights movement (Soundtrack for a Revolution/Wild Bunch). He also recently wrote and directed the feature film Live!(Mosaic Media/The Weinstein Company) starring Eva Mendes and Andre Braugher. He will show clips from his work and discuss storytelling for the screen, the business of film, and some future trends. Since 2001 Guttentag has been teaching a class on the film and television business at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
Carol Muske-Dukes Friday, February 20
Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Sparrow, a National Book Award finalist published by Random House in 2003. She has also published four novels: Life After Death (2001), Saving St. Germ (1993), Dear Digby, and, most recently, Channeling Mark Twain, which has been an LA Times best seller. Well-known as an essayist, critic, and reviewer (she has written extensively for the New York Times), her pieces have been collected and published in two books: Married to the Icepick Killer, A Poet in Hollywood (2002). and Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self , a volume in the "Poets on Poetry" series of the University of Michigan Press (1997). She is professor of English and Creative Writing and founding Director of the PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. A Guggenheim fellowship recipient, she has been recognized by many other awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America, and several Pushcart Prizes.
Margot
Livesey Friday, May 15
Livesey is the author of six novels, Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, and most recently, The House on Fortune Street (May 2008). Raised in the Scottish Highlands, she took her BA in English and philosophy at the University of York in England, and published her first story collection, Learning by Heart, in 1986. She has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin, Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and other prestigious programs, and is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College and the John F. and Dorothy H. Magee writer in residence at Bowdoin College.