SOUL BONE℠ LITERARY FESTIVAL
List of Public MIU MFA Spring ’24 Residency Events
Feb. 12 - Feb. 25, 2024


Our online Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival pairs writing and craft with creative process, consciousness, social justice, and healing. It promotes the kind of writing and creative work that comes from duende, the unspeakable energies that arise from the soles of our feet and run through our spines, that make us feel physically as if the tops of our heads were taken off when we read or write, that connect heart and mind and senses, marrying body and spirit, that involve speaking out against in justice, that spark the mystical soul and give life to our writing, yet that also include death and shadow.

The festival is sponsored by the MIU MFA in Creative Writing’s residencies, with a little help from the Soul Bone℠ Literary Center. Below we list our public events that are included in our Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival. You can register for our Spring 2024 Festival via our Eventbrite page, which is linked in below. Events are free and open to the public, but donations are encouraged. We will use any donations to help sponsor future festivals so we can continue offering our events free of charge. Contact English@miu.edu with questions or for more information. You can also email soulboneliterary@gmail.com directly.

“Please check out all the wonderful events happening at this year’s SOUL BONE℠ LITERARY FESTIVAL. The host community at MIU is incredibly inspiring and nurturing. I always have the best time participating in their events! Thank you so much for inviting me again.”
— Mona Susan Power, author of A Council of Dolls
 

FREE ZOOM REGISTRATION VIA EVENTBRITE
Links will be added in before the end of January
Feb. 12 - 25, 2024

TIME ZONE CONVERTER if you need it. All events are Central Time.

 
 
 

MONDAY, Feb. 12, 2024

In our first festival reading, we'll hear MIU MFA faculty Jennifer, Espinoza and MIU MFA program director Nynke Passi, who will be reading prose tonight.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet whose work has been featured in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, Lambda Literary, PEN America, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016. She also is the author of  I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019). She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of California, Riverside, and is a full-time faculty in MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing.

Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of this MFA program and co-chair of MIU’s English dept. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

 

TUESDAY, February 13

N. J. Campbell signing books at Prairie Lights

In this generative session, author N. J. Campbell will be exploring the power of character and story in the form of a game. Participants will be offered an opportunity to explore the narrative limits of a specific premise within the context of the workshop with a view to questioning those same supposed limits and their fullest, or not so fullest, extent. The aim of the workshop is to encourage ever greater creativity within an ever contracting narrative space in order to equip the participant to be able to engineer or re-engineer any given situation or premise they might encounter within their own work, and the tools to interrogate both structurally and intuitively their relative success in any such endeavour by their own metrics. Workshop attendees will be asked to imagine a set of circumstances, write down their narrative reactions to said circumstances, and then asked a series of questions  about what they discovered in their own work. Attendees will not be asked to share specific aspects of their work, unless they would like to do so, and all feedback in the workshop is self-defined and self-directed, i.e. self-referral--peers and the instructor will not be providing critiques, as this workshop is intended to be process oriented.

N.J. Campbell is an award winning author whose work has been published in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. His work has been taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and his debut novel, Found Audio, published by Two Dollar Radio, was ranked #1 on The Chicago Tribune's Ultimate Summer Reading List in 2017. He is an alumnus of MIU’s Creative Writing program.


 

In this master class, MFA graduate Anne Noble will talk about the subtle play between text and subtext. She’ll discuss how to leave the unsayable unsaid and why. Sometimes what you don’t say has more power than what you do say.

Anne Noble joined our program as a fiction writer in Fall ‘21. She is graduating with a novel that is the fictionalized story of a mother and daughter; choices we make about love, which can seem safe but pan out badly; and the loves we leave behind whom we always long for. Anne lives in Hawaii. She came to our program with an extensive professional background in art and design. She loves multi-genre and cross-media works.

 

Tonight we host the thesis readings of Emilie Lygren and Antwan Linton Penn, who are both graduating after the Spring ‘24 residency.

Antwan Linton Penn joined us as a PhD student in Vedic Science, wishing to explore creative process and the craft of poetry more in-depth before finishing his dissertation, then fell in love with our MFA and is finishing his degree with us this winter. Over the past 20-plus years, Antwan Linton Penn has devoted his life to finding happiness, healing from trauma, and growing in consciousness. Antwan is a visionary, a meditation teacher, a poet, a lover of life, and one of the most loving, self-expressed, authentic, compassionate, and sought-after people, just for being himself. Antwan was fascinated with travel, spirituality, and human potential from an early age. He has completed a BA and MA in Maharishi Vedic Science and an MBA in Human Resource Management with concentrations in Leadership and certification in Conflict Resolution. Aside from the MFA, Antwan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Maharishi Vedic Science.

Emilie Lygren is a poet and outdoor educator who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology-Biology from Brown University. She has published poems in several literary journals and anthologies, and her first collection of poems, "What We Were Born For," was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in February 2022. Emilie has also developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor science education, and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. In her writing and teaching, Emilie calls on awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into relationship with place, self, and community. She lives in San Rafael, California, where she wonders about oaks and teaches poetry in local classrooms. Find more of Emilie's work and words at emilielygren.com. Connect on Instagram: @emlygren.

 

WEDNESDAY, February 14

This morning, we offer you a workshop on sacred poetry and writing toward mystery.

This workshop is offered and taught by Eileen Elizabeth Espinoza, a queer essayist and poet living in Southern California. Espinoza is the co-founder of Boshemia Magazine and the recipient of the 2021 McQuern Award in Nonfiction. Her essays have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been selected by both Dorothy Allison and bell hooks for collections such as The Anthology of Appalachian Writers and Appalachian Review. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction from the University of California, Riverside, and her first book, Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying World, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky (2024). 

 
 
 
 

  • READING
    Love Poems for the Earth - a Valentine
    with Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, Arnoldo Colibrí (García), Mary Mackey, Naomi Quiñónez, and Nynke Passi
    Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

On the Feast of St. Valentine, a group of poets will share their love poems to the Earth, the Great Mother, Madre Tierra, Tonantzin, Pachamama, life-giver and standard of all beauty, whom we have treated with such unkindness and abuse that in her high fever the glaciers melt, land goes dry, forests burn; and in her delirium, storms rage and rivers flood. Everyone is welcome and there will be time for questions and answers. We pray that we be ignited with the fierce love it will take for us to heal ourselves and our Mother.

Rafael Jesús González  is Laureate Emeritus of Berkeley, CA, and once lectured at MIU in the 1970s. Prof. Emeritus of literature and creative writing, he taught at various universities before settling at Laney College, Oakland, California where he founded the Dept. of Mexican & Latin-American Studies 1969. Also visual artist, he has exhibited in the Oakland Museum of California, the Mexican Museum of San Francisco, and others in the U.S. and Mexico. He was Poet in Residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland public library in 1996. Nominated four times for a Pushcart price, he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English and Annenberg CPB for his writing in 2003. In 2013 he received a César E. Chávez Lifetime Award and the City of Berkeley a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He was named the first Poet Laureate of Berkeley in 2017. isit http://rjgonzalez.blogspot.com/

Dr. Naomi Quiñónez, Chicana poet, is the author of three collections of poetry Hummingbird Dream/Sueño de Colibri, The Smoking Mirror and Exiled Moon. Her work has appeared in many publications including 100 Years of Chicanax Latinx Poetry, Voices From The Ancestors, the Colorado Review, Infinite Divisions and From Totems to Hip Hop.  She is editor of  Invocation L.A: Urban Multicultural Poetry and Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Studies in the 21st Century. Quiñonez is a recent honoree of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a recipient of the Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award, a Rockefeller Fellowship and the American Book Award. She is featured in Notable Hispanic Women and the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Arnoldo Colibrí combines visual arts, music, spoken word and poetry in his work as a culture-maker. His has been featured in online literary journals and in diverse cultural gatherings. Arnoldo’s poetry is featured in the new book “Painting the Streets: Oakland Uprising in a Time of Rebellion,” with photographs, essays and poems documenting the explosion of anti-racist and racial justice graffiti art in Oakland after the police murder of George Floyd. Arnoldo co-founded Editorial Xingao, publishing four collections of poetry “XicKorea: words, rants poems together,” “Poets against War & Racism,” and “American Campesino” by Rubén Rangel and “31 Hummingbird” by Aideed Medina. See more at: Art of the Commune and La carpa del FEO: Fandango in East Oakland.

Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. She is the author of 8 poetry collections, including Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Award, and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of a the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press. She is also the author of fourteen novels including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion.

Heart Photos: Mandy Bradshaw

 

THURSAY, February 15

Details about this event are forthcoming.

Emilie Lygren is a poet and outdoor educator who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology-Biology from Brown University. She has published poems in several literary journals and anthologies, and her first collection of poems, "What We Were Born For," was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in February 2022. Emilie has also developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor science education, and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. In her writing and teaching, Emilie calls on awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into relationship with place, self, and community. She lives in San Rafael, California, where she wonders about oaks and teaches poetry in local classrooms. Find more of Emilie's work and words at emilielygren.com. Connect on Instagram: @emlygren.

 

Whether our experience stems from natural disasters or human ones, most of us are shocked in various ways throughout our lives. To engage with, understand, and transform traumatic experience--wildfire, cancer, war, childhood abuse, systemic oppressions--we must apply our creativity very specifically to the circumstances. Writing is one of the most useful tools for this purpose. We'll look at model poems (Bruce Weigl, Linda McCarrisoton, Sharon Olds, and more), do some short in-class exercises, and talk about how to keep readers from turning away when the content is difficult. There's a lot of joy to be found in letting go of what binds us ,and we'll talk about how to express that, too.

Molly Fisk is a poet, radio commentator, life coach, writing teacher, mentor, speaker, and activist, plus the author of four collections of poems and three compilations of essays/commentary. Her book of poetry is called The More Difficult Beauty. She is Poet Laureate Emerita of Nevada County, California (2017-2019).

 
 
 

  • READING
    Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, edited by Tess Taylor
    with Ellen Bass and Danusha Laméris
    Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace, and joy to many. In this new poetry anthology, Leaning toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world. Several of the most well-known contemporary writers, as well as some of poetry’s exciting rising stars, contribute to this collection including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews. A foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, reflective pauses and personal recipes from some of the contributing poets, along with original, whimsical illustrations by Melissa Castrillon, and a ribbon bookmark complete this stunning, hardcover gift format. 

This beautiful poetry anthology offers a warm, inviting selection of poems from a wide range of voices that speak to the collective urge to grow, tend, and heal—an evocative celebration of our connection to the green world. The poets from the anthology who will be reading for you tonight are no other than Ellen Bass and Danusha Laméris!

Ellen Bass’s poetry collections include Indigo, Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. With Florence Howe, she co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! and she co-authored the groundbreaking, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz jails, and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program. You can access her newest Living Room Craft Talk Series here.

Danusha Laméris’s third book of poems, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of two other books: The Moons of August, winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, 2014, and Bonfire Opera (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award. Laméris is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA program and lives in Santa Cruz, California. www.danushalameris.com

 

FRIDAY, February 16

Character. It is the touchstone of literature, be it fiction, creative nonfiction, and sometimes poetry. Literature is character-driven because it is through character that we follow the story, from protagonist (the narrator in creative nonfiction), antagonist, to secondary and walk-on characters, and it is through character that the story grows to universality. How does one effectively write a memorable character? Eugenia Kim will present eight aspects of writing character, from point of view, to character’s desire, to dialogue, to image and physicality, and more. Short exercises will reinforce key elements of writing character, and extended exercises will be provided in handouts to try out on your own.

Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a Library Reads best book of November and Hall of Fame list for 2018, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month/Literature and Fiction. She is a two-time Washington DC, Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient, and received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere.

 

In this session, author Mona Power will be reading from her first novel, The Grass Dancer, winner of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for First Fiction. Inspired by the lore of her Native American heritage, this critically-acclaimed novel from Susan Power—an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe—weaves the stories of the old and the young, of broken families, romantic rivals, men and women in love and at war. Set on a North Dakota reservation, The Grass Dancer reveals the harsh price of unfulfilled longings and the healing power of mystery and hope. Rich with drama and infused with the magic of the everyday, it takes readers on a journey through both past and present—in a tale as resonant and haunting as an ancestor's memory, and as promising as a child's dream. 

Mona Susan Power is the author of three books: The Grass Dancer (a novel), Roofwalker (a story collection), Sacred Wilderness (a novel), and A Council of Dolls (a novel). The Grass Dancer was awarded a PEN/Hemingway prize in 1995 and Roofwalker a Milkweed National Fiction Prize in 2002. Her new novel, A Council of Dolls, is a finalist in the 2024 Minnesota Book Awards. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies including: The Best American Short Stories of 1993, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and Granta. Her fellowships include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, Loft McKnight Fellowship for 2015-16, and Native Arts and Cultures Fellowship for 2016-17. She is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

 
 
 
“As we celebrate the rollout of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, let this inspiring collection be a reminder that there is nothing beyond our capacity if we work together.”
— President Joe Biden

  • READING
    Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States
    with Luisa A. Igloria (editor together with Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman), Molly Fisk, M. G. Bertulfo, January Gill O’Neil, and Claire Wahmanholm
    Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

In this festival and residency, we focus strongly on climate. We are honored to host the virtual Midwest book launch of the new climate anthology, Dear Human at the Edge of Time, edited by Luisa A. Igloria and Aileen Cassinetto. We will have with us Luisa A. Igloria, Molly Fisk, M. G. Bertulfo, January Gill O’Neil, and Claire Wahmanholm.

In the U.S., the congressionally mandated Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) report is currently in development, and groups of scientists from all over the country and Caribbean are overseeing the synthesis of published research for regional and topic-specific chapters. Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States is offered as a companion to NCA5, and an additional opportunity to participate in the urgent conversations on environmental justice. Edited by Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows Luisa A. Igloria & Aileen Cassinetto and NCA5 Chapter Lead Dr. Jeremy S. Hoffman, the anthology's 70+ contributors include Union of Concerned Scientists director Erika Spanger and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, with Foreword by Claire Wahmanholm and Afterword by Dr. Sam Illingworth. The anthology won the 2023 American Book Fest Best Book Award and is published by Paloma Press.

Originally from Baguio, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), and 12 other books. In 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry. A Louis I. Jaffe Professor and University Professor of English and Creative Writing, she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. Dr. Igloria also leads workshops at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia 2020-22, Emerita. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. www.luisaigloria.com

Mary Grace Bertulfo has written for television and children’s education at CBS, Pearson Education Asia, and Schlessinger and for the magazines Sierra and Chicago Wilderness. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Growing Up Filipino II, Our Own Voice, City of Big Shoulders and others. She has an MA in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University where she was the Orion scholar and was awarded the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize. Mary Grace founded Banyan: Asian American Writers Collective in Chicago where she paddles rivers and meanders prairies.

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She’s the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and Everything But the Kitchen Skunk among other books and has won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills, where she provides weekly commentary to community radio, and works as a radical life coach. Visit her
at mollyfisk.com and www.patreon.com/mollyfisk

January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Glitter Road (forthcoming, 2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she was the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She currently serves as the 2022-2023 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writers Programs (AWP).

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater (2023), Redmouth (2019), and Wilder (2018). Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Cream City Review, TriQuarterly, Sierra, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, and Beloit Poetry Journal. A 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow, and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize, she lives in the Twin Cities.

 

SATURDAY, Feb. 17

In this session, podcaster, journalist, and editor Donna Schill will talk about her own journey of starting her podcast, Thread the Needle. She will also highlight pragmatic information for anyone who wants to learn about podcasting and has ideas of their own.

Thread the Needle is a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. Using storytelling and research, Thread the Needle helps make sense of the messages women receive about their bodies, relationships, careers, and place in society. A core mission of this show is to feature the stories and creative work of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.

Donna Schill is the host and producer of Thread the Needle, plus an editor and journalist who started Thread the Needle (theneedle.co) as a way to explore her own relationship to feminism. From chivalry to gender identity, from housework to motherhood, she found that she wasn’t the only one sifting through conflicting ideas about important feminist issues. Donna earned her masters degree in journalism from the University of Iowa and her bachelors in communications from Maharishi International University. Donna is also editor in chief at iPhone Life Magazine.

 

• A TALK & READINGS
Short Prose Forms: A Guided Tour
with Alan Ziegler
Time: 1:30 AM - 3:30 PM CT
Free Eventbrite registration here

We have with us this afternoon the master of the short prose form, Alan Ziegler from Columbia University.

Many prose poems are indistinguishable from short-short stories; brief essays from prose poems; and fragments from prose poems and brief essays. Some authors eschew genre and refer to their pieces generically as texts or works. Short prose forms may be impossible to define but they are fascinating to talk about. We will consider a wide range of forms, approaches, and styles, spanning the last 185 years (with some precursors) from a variety of authors, languages, and time periods. In addition to works in English, Alan Ziegler will read translations from the French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. He will also incorporate readings of his own work.

Alan Ziegler is the editor of Short: An International Anthology of 500 Years of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms (Persea Books). His other books include Love At First Sight: An Alan Ziegler Reader; The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes (with an introduction by Richard Howard); The Green Grass of Flatbush (winner of the Word Beat Fiction Book Award, selected by George Plimpton); So Much To Do (poems); The Writing Workshop, Volumes I and II; and The Writing Workshop Note Book. His work has appeared in such places as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Tin House. He is Professor of Writing and Director of Pedagogy at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he has received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and was chair of the Writing Program. His cross-genre memoir(ish) Based on a True Life will appear in the Fall of 2024. He contributes frequently to http://tinyurl.com/Best-American-Poetry.

 
 
 

Tonight we’ll be joined by two amazing novelists, memoirists, and essayists, Susanne Paola Antonetta and Ellen Birkett Morris.

Susanne Paola Antonetta has published nonfiction including The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Make Me a Mother,  A Mind Apart: Travels in the Neurodiverse, and Body Toxic. Her new book, The Devil’s Castle, is forthcoming. Her grants and awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, Ken Johnson/Nami award, a Pushcart, a finalist for poetry’s Lenore Marshall Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies. She also edits the Bellingham Review.

Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, stories about female strength and resilience, winner of the Pencraft Award. Her novel Beware the Tall Grass is a finalist for the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader Magazine, and on National Public Radio.

 

SUNDAY, Feb. 18

Art: Jennifer BLair

What does a storm taste like, a hydrangea sound like? What is the texture or scent of a cloud? What are the colors of indifference or impermanence? In this workshop, Jennifer Espinoza will lead writers through a creative process of developing synesthesia, your brain’s ability to route sensory information through multiple unrelated senses, causing you to experience more than one sense simultaneously and/or access and mix up your sensory experience in whimsical and lyrical ways.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet whose work has been featured in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, Lambda Literary, PEN America, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016. She also is the author of  I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019). She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of California, Riverside, and is a full-time faculty in MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing.

 
 
 

Tonight we’ll hear from two Montana authors, who are long-time friends: poet Tami Haaland and fiction writer and memoirist Mark Spragg.

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction and the novels The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. Mark also has an extensive history as a screenwriter, writing the scripts for movies such as An Unfinished Life and Everything that Rises.

Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including, Ascent, Consequence, The American Journal of Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Healing the Divide.  Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown. Haaland served as Montana's Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015.

 

MONDAY, Feb. 19

Author and educator Stuart Tanner talks about world building in fiction.

Stuart Tanner is an acclaimed producer and director of documentary films for the BBC, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, and others. He is the founder and former chair of the Cinematic Arts and New Media department at MIU and has taught narrative courses, including world building, for decades. He is also the author of Devas, a speculative novel. His projects and awards include: Saving the Disposable Ones, a documentary that takes you to the heartbreaking streets of inner-city Columbia, where Father Gabriel Mejia, a Catholic priest, is transforming the lives of thousands of children by providing shelter, love and Transcendental Meditation; Children of Vengeance (2002), a documentary for the BBC on the Arab-Israeli conflict, won the Foreign Press Association’s Story of the Year award; and Death on the Silk Road, on the effects of nuclear testing in China, won the Rory Peck Award for Journalism in 1999, among other titles.

 

Candice Rankin received her BFA in Creative Writing at Maharishi International University. She was born in Southern Indiana, attended five different high schools, and lived in 18 states. Along the way she studied theatre and graduated from Circle in the Square, The American Academy of Dramatic Arts (NYC), and The Groundlings (Los Angeles). Candice writes about the pain of her dysfunctional childhood and sexuality while staring down inner demons and interjecting dry and inappropriate humor along the way. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in Wingless Dreamer Chapbook, Typehouse Literary Magazine, East/West Literary Forum, and the Stoneboat Literary Journal. She is currently a second-year MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and working on her memoir, The Grasshopper Wars. She will be reading from her newest publication in The Ocotillo Review Volume 7.2, in which Sixty international literary artists showcase their work exploring new horizons. She will also read other work.

 
 
 

  • MIU MFA SPRING 2024 MENTOR READING and Q & A
    with Susan Daniels (fiction), Eileen Espinoza (creative nonfiction) & Sasha Kamini Parmasad (poetry)
    7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

Tonight we are joined by our three mentors for the Spring ‘24 semester of MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing: Sasha Kamini Parmasad (poetry), Susan Daniels (fiction), and Eileen Espinoza (creative nonfiction).

Sasha Kamini Parmasad (she/her) is a frequent fiction or creative nonfiction mentor in our MFA, teaches our introduction to consciousness-based education courses, and is our resident TM-teacher. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is the author of the poetry collection No Poem (Yuganta Press). She has designed and taught academic and creative writing courses at Columbia University. Her work is included in Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahithya Akademi) and an anthology from Red Hen Press.

Susan Smith Daniels (she/her) is a frequent fiction mentor and a core fiction faculty of our MFA. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Published by New Rivers Press, her novel, The Genuine Stories, won the Fairfield University Book Prize in 2017. Her memoir, The Horse Show Mom’s Survival Guide, was published by Lyons Press.

Eileen Elizabeth Espinoza is a queer essayist and poet, the co-founder of Boshemia Magazine, and the recipient of the 2021 McQuern Award in Nonfiction. Her essays have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been selected by both Dorothy Allison and bell hooks for collections such as The Anthology of Appalachian Writers and Appalachian Review. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction from the University of California, Riverside, and her first book, Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying World, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky (2024). 

 

TUESDAY, Feb. 20

In this master class, professor Steven Schneider will explore the villanelle, the history of the form and its structure. The first hour will present an overview and in the second hour participants can try their hand at this form in a generative workshop. Participants are expected to read in advance the handouts for this master class.

Steven P. Schneider is a poet, scholar, and critic. He is the co-creator, with his artist wife Reefka, of two bilingual, ekphrastic exhibits and books: Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives / Fronteras: dibujando las vidas and The Magic of Mariachi / La Magia del Mariachi. He is also the author of the poetry collections Unexpected Guests. He also is the editor of The Contemporary Narrative Poem: Critical Crosscurrents published by the University of Iowa Press and is the author of four collections of poetry and the editor and author of three scholarly books on Contemporary Poetry. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and an elected member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

You can find the handout to this workshop here.

 

  • PRESENTATION and Q & A
    How to Start a Small Press Out of Thin Air
    with Diane Frank, co-founder of Blue Light Press
    1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

In this informative presentation, co-founder of Blue Light Press and author Diane Frank will lift the curtains and explain how to start a small press out of thin air. She will draw on decades of experience with Blue Light Press. She will also be available for Q & A at the end of the session.

Diane Frank is author of eight books of poems, two novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. She is editor of Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, which was featured on KQED.  Diane plays cello in the Golden Gate Symphony. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Blue Light Press is a collective of poets and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area who produce artistically designed books. Blue Light Press is dedicated to the publication of poetry, fiction, and flash fiction that is imagistic, inventive, emotionally honest, and pushes the language to a deeper level of insight.

 
 
 

  • READING
    Glitter Road (January Gill O’Neil) and Blue Atlas (Susan Rich)
    with January Gill O’Neil and Susan Rich
    7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (February 2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2024 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

Susan Rich is the author of eight books including Blue Atlas (forthcoming from Red Hen Press), Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry), Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, named a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue, winner of the PEN USA Award. Along with Brian Turner and Ilya Kaminsky, she edited The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders (Poetry Foundation). She has received awards and fellowships from Fulbright Foundation, PEN USA, The Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers, Artist Trust, CityArtists, and 4Culture.

 

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 21

GENERATIVE WORKSHOP
Writing Our Grief
with Emily June Breffle
Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Free Eventbrite registration here

In this generative workshop, MIU MFA graduate student Emily June Breffle will be exploring our common griefs - from environmental losses to waste, to personal grief of disconnection, letting go, and death.

Emmy June Breffle is our resident prophet, cake and lasagna baker, singer, tiny house dweller, art book maker, gardener, sustainability expert, publisher, grief-workshop expert, and free spirit who asks the best questions of our guests, celebrates everyone on their birthdays with songs that extend to the ancestors, and writes inspired lyrical prose. Emily is graduating with a book of poetry, but she’s also started an art book and publishing collective called Paper Moon, and she’s been teaching art book making and grief workshops in Fairfield, Iowa.

 

Humans face mounting uncertainty as the planet's increasing warmth sets off cascading weather effects, and these in turn affect our daily lives. Everyone carries this unsettled feeling in different ways: anxiety, denial, activism, grief, distraction, terror, etc. Poetry has always been a way to cope with the unknown, the ambiguous, and to remind us we aren't alone. Its very nature resists closure and easy answers, and also calls us together. In this workshop we'll look at how Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, and many others approach uncertainty, and explore how to address it ourselves.

Molly Fisk is a poet, radio commentator, life coach, writing teacher, mentor, speaker, and activist, plus the author of four collections of poems and three compilations of essays/commentary. Her book of poetry is called The More Difficult Beauty. She is Poet Laureate Emerita of Nevada County, California (2017-2019).

 

  • PANEL
    Knowing the Unknowable: Intuition and Risk in Poetry and Prose
    with Kelli Russel Agodon, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Mona (Susan) Power, Susan Rich, and Nynke Passi
    Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

We don’t talk enough about the power of accessing the intuitive mind to deepen our creative process and work. Drawing on an inclusive feminine perspective and Indigenous wisdom, panelists chart their personal journeys into the mysterious wilderness of the imagination where we know the unknowable, where poems and stories sing in the trees of our bones, where passions ignite and dreams call from subconscious depth, offering metaphors as gifts. How can meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and self-care open us to silence so we listen and hear?

In this panel, we’ll dialogue about our risky, glorious relationship with our intuition. Panelists share tools to facilitate creative and emotional risk taking and connection to intuition to help us hear our inner voices and peel back deeper layers of ourselves. Our panel represents an inclusive feminine perspective and honors Indigenous approaches to finding new ways of seeing and other ways of being as writers. Tonight we will hear from Kelli Russel Agodon, Susan Rich, Mona (Susan) Power, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, and Nynke Passi.

 

THURSDAY, February 22

Do you feel unsafe to speak your truth or be your authentic self? Do you make yourself smaller and hide your power and magical self and gifts? Do you doubt your own intuition and tune down your emotions so others won’t feel threatened? Are you a mystic at heart, though you don’t dare tell anyone?

If so, you may carry the ancient burden of the witch wound, the collective trauma of all the women, men, and children who were innocently tortured, burned at the stake, beheaded, drowned, or hanged for their magic, independence, and free-thinking spiritual beliefs. Through many centuries, healers, midwives, wise women and men, those who were gifted and spiritually awake, diviners, teachers, those who were too outspoken, too magical, too old, too rich, too beautiful, too poor, too ugly, or too wise and knowing to be tolerated by patriarchal, capitalist, and religiously conservative society, were persecuted for simply being themselves. Many perished, and if they survived, they carried the memory of persecution in their minds and bodies. This ancestral fear of persecution and dimming of inner light may have been passed down from generation to generation.

And here you are, a writer or creative, and you are aware that something is holding you back, that you don’t feel totally safe to be deeply seen and known, which affects your creative powers. In this two-hour workshop, we’ll discuss the witch wound and go through a series of rituals and enchantments to reunite you with your lost authentic self. We’ll create sacred space to empower your voice to be heard and your being to be seen so you can write and create from this deeper, more magical place where your heart and soul are at home.

Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of the Soul Bone Literary Center and Festival and MIU's MFA in Creative Writing. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day

 

In this generative workshop, author Susanne Paola Antonetta will explore the relationship between myth and memory.

Susanne Paola Antonetta has published nonfiction including The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Make Me a Mother,  A Mind Apart: Travels in the Neurodiverse, and Body Toxic. Her new book, The Devil’s Castle, is forthcoming. Her grants and awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, Ken Johnson/Nami award, a Pushcart, a finalist for poetry’s Lenore Marshall Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies. She also edits the Bellingham Review.

 

  • READING
    California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology
    with Molly Fisk (editor), Danusha Laméris, Rafael Gonzalez, and Kim Shuck
    Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration here

We are honored and happy to have with us a reprise of an event from our very first residency, a reading from the anthology California Fire & Water: a Climate Crisis Anthology, edited by Molly Fisk. As part of a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, former Nevada County Poet Laureate Molly Fisk created a project to teach kids across California to write poems about climate crisis as a way to work out their feelings about it. Out of the best of those poems and poems contributed by over 100 adults, she put together an extraordinary anthology, California Fire & Water.

This anthology includes poems by Brenda Hillman, Danusha Lameris, Ellen Bass, Gary Snyder, Indigo Moor, Jane Hirsfield, Juan Felipe Herrera, Kim Addonizio, Kim Shuck, Lee Herrick, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and a foreword by SA Smythe. We are lucky that tonight Molly is bringing with her several of the poets published in this anthology: Danusha Lameris, Rafael J. Gonzalez, and Kim Shuck. Together they will give a reading, addressing the climate crisis that impacts us all and that so urgently needs to be addressed.

Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Her second book is Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press), and she was the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award.

Rafael Jesus Gonzalez is the current Poet Laureate of Berkeley, CA and once lectured at MIU in the 1970s. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, he taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.

Kim Shuck is widely published in journals, anthologies and a couple of solo books. She enjoys volunteering in SFUSD elementary school classrooms to share her loves of origami, poetry, beading, and basket making. In 2019 Shuck was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award. Kim Shuck is Poet Laureate Emerita of San Francisco.

Molly Fisk is a poet, radio commentator, life coach, writing teacher, mentor, speaker, and activist, plus the author of four collections of poems and three compilations of essays/commentary. Her book of poetry is called The More Difficult Beauty. She is Poet Laureate Emerita of Nevada County, California (2017-2019).

 

FRIDAY, Feb. 23

Whether discussing genre work such as sci-fi and fantasy or the grittiest literary realism, fiction prominently features something we rarely experience in life: endings. The highschool bully you never thought you'd see again sends you a message request on Instagram. Skirmishes once thought of as separate conflicts are contextualized into unceasing wars. Facebook memories shows you a picture of you and your dead mother. As the world has become increasingly interconnected, it's increasingly difficult to break away from anyone or anything with any sense of finality. With this in mind, how do we craft endings in our fiction to present to a world in which nothing ever ends? In this workshop, we'll examine endings from various novels and short stories, both classic and contemporary, as well as work on a short prompt to probe what we believe makes an ending work. Is it the wrapping up of a plot? Reaching the destination of a long journey? Is it an emotional resonance? In Endings in the Neverending we will ask ourselves why our last sentences are last, even when we know our stories are ongoing. 

Eric Boyd (he/him) is our Fall ‘23 fiction mentor. He is a winner of the PEN Prison Writing Award and Slice Magazine's Bridging the Gap Award. His writing has appeared in Joyland, Hobart, Guernica, and The Offing, as well as the anthologies Prison Noir (Akashic Books) edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and Words Without Walls (Trinity University Press). He is the editor of The Pittsburgh Anthology (Belt Publishing) and holds an MFA from The Writer's Foundry in New York City.

 

In this generative workshop, novelist and memoirist Ellen Birkett Morris explores how to write the unknowable in an exploration of fiction.

Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, stories about female strength and resilience, winner of the Pencraft Award. Her novel Beware the Tall Grass is a finalist for the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader Magazine, and on National Public Radio.

 
 
 
 
 

We are thrilled to have with us two of our favorite past guests, the amazing novelists Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Eugenia Kim!

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly (Links to an external site.) and The New Yorker, and her writing included in over 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese; many have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her novels have been made into films and plays. Born in Kolkata, India, she now teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she is the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing. Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges (an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (a Tamil TV serial) respectively. A short story, "The Word Love," from her collection Arranged Marriage, was made into a bilingual short film in Bengali and English, titled Ammar Ma. All the flims have won awards.

Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a Library Reads best book of November and Hall of Fame list for 2018, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month/Literature and Fiction. She is a two-time Washington DC, Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient, and received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere. An MFA graduate of Bennington College, Eugenia has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Asia Literary Review and Raven Chronicles. She teaches at Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program. Eugenia is the daughter of Korean immigrant parents who came to America shortly after the Pacific War.  “My parents’ stories seemed to carry an urgency meant to instill a Korean identity that was seeping from us with each new American word learned, each Korean word lost.”

 
 

Photo credit: Paulina Rzepkowska

 

SATURDAY, Feb. 24

  • SOAPBOX SPEAKEASY PRESENTS
    Cultivating Authentic Voices without Re-Traumatizing Communities
    with Doña Monserrat Iñiguez
    Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
    Free Eventbrite registration

With the proliferation of art as activism, uplifting historically marginalized voices has become a core practice of many venues and spaces. This session looks at how this centering of voices creates an expectation that those communities perform their trauma for audiences under the guise of “education”, and ways to cultivate and celebrate authenticity without exploiting trauma as the only source of art from historically marginalized groups.

Doña Monserrat Iñiguez is the founder and director of Soapbox Speakeasy, a community-led platform for language arts performance based out of Fairfield, Iowa. The daughter of Mexican immigrant parents, Doña Monserrat was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, where she received what she describes as her "post-secondary education" at the Labor Community Strategy Center, a Los Angeles-based think/act tank that works to build regional, national and international movements. Doña Monserrat is a recipient of the 2020 Governor's Emmy® Award from the Upper Midwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for her role in the documentary, Breaking Bread, Building Bridges. She enjoys making salsa, dancing folklorico, and practicing Jiu Jitsu.

 

Description of this event is forthcoming.

Antwan Linton Penn joined us as a PhD student in Vedic Science, wishing to explore creative process and the craft of poetry more in-depth before finishing his dissertation, then fell in love with our MFA and is finishing his degree with us this winter. Over the past 20-plus years, Antwan Linton Penn has devoted his life to finding happiness, healing from trauma, and growing in consciousness. Antwan is a visionary, a meditation teacher, a poet, a lover of life, and one of the most loving, self-expressed, authentic, compassionate, and sought-after people, just for being himself. Antwan was fascinated with travel, spirituality, and human potential from an early age. He has completed a BA and MA in Maharishi Vedic Science and an MBA in Human Resource Management with concentrations in Leadership and certification in Conflict Resolution. Aside from the MFA, Antwan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Maharishi Vedic Science.

 

Tonight we host the thesis readings of Anne Noble and Emily June Breffle, who are both graduating after the Spring ‘24 residency.

Anne Noble joined our program as a fiction writer in Fall ‘21. She is graduating with a novel that is the fictionalized story of a mother and daughter; choices we make about love, which can seem safe but pan out badly; and the loves we leave behind whom we always long for. Anne lives in Hawaii. She came to our program with an extensive professional background in art and design. She loves multi-genre and cross-media works.

Emmy June Breffle is our resident prophet, cake and lasagna baker, singer, tiny house dweller, art book maker, gardener, sustainability expert, publisher, grief-workshop expert, and free spirit who asks the best questions of our guests, celebrates everyone on their birthdays with songs that extend to the ancestors, and writes inspired lyrical prose. Emily is graduating with a book of poetry, but she’s also started an art book and publishing collective called Paper Moon, and she’s been teaching art book making and grief workshops in Fairfield, Iowa.

 

SUNDAY, Feb. 25

Nickole Brown will be reading from her work followed by a Q & A session in this intimate, creative afternoon focused on nature, climate, earth, and our human connection to our environment.

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.  She is the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.

 

Nickole Brown will offering a generative workshop following her reading.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.