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CREATIVE WRITING READING SERIES

 Fall 2013

 

 

 

 Bernard Cooper

7:30pm Wednesday, September 18^th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

Bernard Cooper’s most recent book is The Bill From My Father (Simon & Schuster).  He is also the author of Maps To Anywhere, (University of Georgia Press), A Year of Rhymes (Viking), Truth Serum (Houghton Mifflin), and a collection of short stories, Guess Again (Simon & Schuster). His book My Avant-Gard Education is forthcoming from Norton. Bernard Cooper is the recipient of the 1991 PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, a 1995 O. Henry Prize, a 1999 Guggenheim grant, and a 2004 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in literature.  His work has appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Essays of 1988, 1995, and 1997, 2002, and 2008., and in magazines including, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. 

 

 

 

 

 Rae Armantrout

7:30pm Wednesday, October 23rd

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

 

Just Saying, Rae Armantrout’s most recent book of poems, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2013. Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award.  Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007), was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times. Other recent books include Money Shot (Wesleyan, 2011,) Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007), Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Armantrout received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

 

 

 

 

Cristina Garcia

7:30pm Wednesday, November 13th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

Cristina García is the author of five novels: The Lady Matador’s Hotel, (Scribner, 2010); A Handbook to Luck (Knopf, 2007); Monkey Hunting (Knopf, 2003); The Agüero Sisters (Knopf, 1997), winner of the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize; and Dreaming in Cuban (Knopf, 1992), finalist for the National Book Award. García has edited two anthologies, Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature (2006) and Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature (2003). She is also the author of three works for young readers, Dreams of Significant Girls (2011), a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s; The Dog Who Loved the Moon, illustrated by Sebastia Serra, (Atheneum, 2008); and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox (Simon and Schuster, 2008). Her next novel, King of Cuba, will be released in 2013.

 

Matthew Zapruder

7:30pm Wednesday, December 4th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon 2010), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Tin House, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Bomb, Slate, Poetry, and The Believer. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. A member of the Core Faculty of the MFA program at Saint Mary's College, he is also a Senior Editor at Wave Books. His fourth collection of poems, Sun Bear, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in spring 2014.

 

 

Spring 2014

 

 

Kaya Oakes

7:30pm, Wednesday, February 19th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

 

 

 

Kaya Oakes' third book, a hybrid memoir/ethnography/theological rant, Radical Reinvention, was published by Counterpoint Press in 2012. Her previous nonfiction book, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evoluation of Indie Culture, was published by Henry Holt in 2009 and was selected as a San Francisco Chronicle notable book. She’s also the author of a collection of poetry, Telegraph, which received the Transcontinental Poetry Prize from Pavement Saw Press. In 2002, Kaya co-founded Kitchen Sink Magazine, which received the Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Magazine in 2003. Currently, she writes about faith and feminism for Commonweal, America, and Killing the Buddha, and is the editor in chief of Limina: A Magazine of Women Writing About Faith on the Margins, which will launch in the summer of 2013. Since 1999, she has taught expository, research, creative nonfiction and narrative journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Kaya has been the recipient of teaching fellowships from the Mellon Faculty Institute and the Bay Area Writing Project, as well as writing awards from the Academy of American Poets.

 

 

Joshua Mohr

7:30pm, Wednesday, March 12th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

 

 

 

Joshua Mohr is the author of four novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.”  He’s also written Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as Termite Parade, an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List.  He lives in San Francisco and teaches in the MFA program at USF. His latest novel Fight Song was published in February 2013.

 

Norma Cole

7:30pm,Wednesday, April 9th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge

 

Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (2010) is her most recent book of poetry. Other books of poetry include Natural Light, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 and Spinoza in Her Youth. A book of essays and talks, To Be At Music, was published in 2010. Her translations from the French include Jean Daive’s A Woman With Several Lives, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen, Danielle Collobert’s It Then and Crosscut Universe: Writers on Writing From France. Cole has received awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2008 she curated an exhibition at the Cue Gallery. Also in 2008, Cole was a Regents’ Lecturer at UC Berkeley. In 2011 she was a columnist at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “Open Space” http://blog.sfmoma.org/author/normacole/. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

 

 

 

Rosemary Graham & Erin Lindsay McCabe

7:30pm,Wednesday, May 7th

Soda Center, Claeys Lounge 

 

Erin Lindsay McCabe studied Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, earned a teaching credential at California State University, Chico, and taught high school English for seven years before completing her MFA at St. Mary’s College in 2010.  She is currently teaching Composition at Butte College, and eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first novel, I Shall Be Near to You, forthcoming from Crown in 2014.

 

 

Rosemary Graham is the author of three novels:  Thou Shalt Not Dump the Skater Dude, My Not-So-Terrible Time at the Hippie Hotel, and Stalker Girl. Her essays and commentaries have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Monica Review, and on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."  She is Professor of English and core faculty in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA.

 

 

 

ALL READINGS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

For More information on The Creative Writing Reading Series please contact Sara Mumolo, (925)631-8556 or sm13@stmarys-ca.edu.