MFA Creative Writing

He will be rescheduled for the Spring 12 semester!

Alexander MacLeod, professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, will be reading from his collection of short stories, Light Lifting, on Wednesday, November 30^th, 2011, at the Hammes Bookstore on Notre Dame’s campus.

The reading begins at 7:30 PM.

Alexander MacLeod was born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ontario. His first collection of short stories, Light Lifting (Biblioasis 2010), was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, two Atlantic Book Awards, and went on to become a national bestseller. Alexander holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill; he currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

According to the publisher Biblioasis, “Alexander MacLeod’s long-awaited debut offers us a suite of darkly urban and unflinching elegies. These are elemental stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and tragedy barely averted, but also of beauty, love and fragile understanding.” 

The reading is free and open to the public.

Alice Notley, author of The Descent of Alette and Culture of One, will be reading from her work on Wednesday, November 16^th, 2011, at the Hammes Bookstore on Notre Dame’s campus. The reading begins at 7:30 PM.

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California, in the Mohave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, at Barnard College in New York City, and at The Writers Workshop, University of Iowa. She subsequently lived in San Francisco and Bolinas, Chicago, England (London and Wivenhoe), for 16 years again in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She considers herself to be geopsychically most connected to the Mohave, to New York, and to Paris; she is thus, through chance and fate, an international poet, and her work reflects a knowledge of several landscapes and cultures, in which she is both habitué and stranger. She writes in a variety of genres and styles, often fictionalizing in verse, or mixing prose with poetry, and visiting as many imaginary, real, or disputed realms as she can locate. She is the winner of a number of prizes and awards, among them the Los Angeles Times Book Award (for Mysteries of Small Houses), the Griffin Prize (for Disobedience), and the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize (for Grave of Light, Selected Poems 1970-2005). She is probably most well-known for the epic poem, The Descent of Alette. Her most recent books are Culture of One, which is a sort of novel in poems, and the forthcoming Songs and Stories of the Ghouls.

This event is also funded by The Henkels Lecture Fund, Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters.

The reading is free and open to the public.

Nathaniel Perry, author of Nine Acres and editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, will be reading from his work on Wednesday, November 9^th, 2011, at the Hammes Bookstore on Notre Dame’s campus. The reading begins at 7:30 PM.

Nathaniel Perry’s work Nine Acres (APR/Copper Canyon, 2011) won the 2011 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. His manuscript was chosen from more than 1,000 entries. Perry earned Master’s degrees from Boston University and Indiana University. He lives with his family in rural southside Virginia. In an interview with John Dudley on his work and teaching at Hampden-Sydney College, Perry states, “Teaching at Hampden-Sydney has provided me with a rare opportunity–the chance to learn and think at the highest levels, in the heart of rural America. This unusual combination plays a major role in the book: the poems attempt to understand self-sustainability on all levels, on the land, with each other, in the mind and heart, and, perhaps, in the spirit as well. Nine Acres takes as its starting place the classic farm manual, Five Acres and Independence by M.G. Kains, so perhaps it is a metaphorical ‘independence’ that I am after…”

The reading is free and open to the public.

Perry’s link