Winter is particularly harsh for night owls, including me. When we stay up late with endless papers and deadlines, we are at least glad that the spring is coming, and we can throw off our winter coats soon. When we are so exhausted and collapse on bed without thinking about quilts, we make a fatal mistake. The winter strikes the next morning, and we are too frozen to find our precious blankets. We really wish we can undergo mutation to have thick fur of bears, so we can sleep despite our misinterpretations of the season.
But the good news is, despite the false sign, the spring is eventually coming, and please mark May 3rd in your calendar, a day with a event that will definitely inspire you to crawl out of the bed in the first month of the *actual* spring 😉
The MFA thesis reading is happening on May 3rd, featuring top-notch poetry and fiction of graduating MFA students. Over 2017 -2018 academic year, they have enriched workshops with idiosyncratic writing styles, and have successfully defended their thesis. Now it’s time to celebrate and hear their excellent work. Here are the bios of these fabulous writers:
Abigail Burns earned her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she studied English literature, creative writing, and rhetoric. Her writing primarily focuses on how grief and loss work to shatter our sense of normality. Queer rhetorical theory and writers like James Baldwin, Jeanette Winterson, and Toni Morrison, all influence her work. Abby’s other interests include social movements, intersectional feminism, migration studies, and cheese curds.
Erik-John Fuhrer is inspired by hybrid forms of literary expression that elide literary and generic boundaries. In his own work, he is interested in destabilizing the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. His work has recently appeared in venues such as Crab Fat, Noble/Gas Qrtrly, Dream Pop Press, BlazeVox, and elsewhere.
Madison McCartha’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, DREGINALD, Full-Stop, jubilat, Yalobusha Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He has served both as Asst. Editor and Design Editor for Cream City Review, and became the Poetry Editor for Storm Cellar.
Ingabirano Nintunze is a writer, artist, and theatre-maker from Portland by way of Austin. She majored in English Literature and Telecommunication Media Studies at Texas A&M University, where she won undergraduate writing awards in poetry and fiction. She’s a second year MFA in Creative Writing, and in 2019 will be researching as a playwright in New Zealand as a Fulbright scholar. Her writing explores urban and suburban magic, the natural world, belief systems, comparative mythologies, and bridging the mundane with the fantastic.
After graduating high school in northern Michigan, Daniel Tharp attended Kirtland Community College for a year before graduating from Pittsburg State University with a Bachelors of Arts degree and a Masters Degree. In June, 2017 his essay, “Thomas McGonigle: A Lineage of Literary Intimidation,” was published as the lead essay for the Hollins Critic. He currently attends Notre Dame as the Prose Fellow, and will graduate May, 2018 with his Master of Fine Arts degree.
Daniel Uncapher is an MFA candidate at Notre Dame and Sparks prize winner from Water Valley, Mississippi whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House Online, Chicago Quarterly Review, Baltimore Review, Hawai’I Pacific Review, A-Minor Magazine, Wilderness House, and others.
Jean Yoon: Who or what is Jean? Where did Jean come from? Extruded from some recombination of biological will-to-existence and hashed through the haphazard mechanics of globalism’s recursivity, Jean makes use of their uselessness using the most-abused material known to capital-m Man–that is, language. Thusly do they attempt to celebrate and soften the haphazard violence that attends living in this version of the world. Jean’s literate mark-making can be found in journals like jubilat, open letters monthly, poetry is dead, spf lit mag, hypocrite reader, and others.
The reading will be held in in Eck Center Auditorium on Thursday from 7:00PM – 9:00p.m. on May 3, 2018. I will see you there!
Lavinia