MFA Creative Writing

Come out to Geddes Hall Café on Wednesday, December 2, 2015 at 7:30 PM to hear the work of three 2nd-year MFA candidates: fiction writers Evan Harris and Kyle Muntz, and poet Ae Hee Lee.

These writers span the spectrum in their interests and preoccupations:

Evan Harris writes fiction and essays. His work-in-progress includes a paranoia about the legacy of biographical data published on the internet.

Ae Hee Lee is South Korean by birth and Peruvian by heart and memory. She writes mythical and mystical, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic poetry that likes to explore worlds and loves within and beyond the human.

Kyle Muntz‘s current project integrates elements of mythology, surrealism, and the grotesque with fantasy narratives.

Event open to all and free! Don’t miss out!

-Tania

The fourth event of the Creative Writing Program’s Fall Reading Series is coming up!

Orlando Ricardo Menes, poet, translator and Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, will be reading at the Hammes Bookstore, Wednesday October 14, 7:30 p.m. The reading is free and open to all and if you enjoy listening to enchanting, enchanting poetry, you should most definitely be there!

About Orlando:

Orlando Ricardo Menes is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches creative writing, literature, and translation. His latest poetry collections are Heresies (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) and Fetish, winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of Furia (Milkweed, 2005) and Rumba atop the Stones (Peepal Tree, 2001). His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009). That same year he received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry delves into questions of liminality, the hybrid sacred, diaspora and exile, and the relationship between the cross-cultural imagination and a poetics of the baroque.

Be there!

– Tania

Come hear 4 writers read their work in one night!!!

Michael Martone will be reading at the Hammes Bookstore on October 7th, 7:30 pm, along with Joyelle McSweeney, Kelcey Parker and Valerie Sayers, in celebration of Winesburg, Indiana: A Fork River Anthology (2015). Winesburg, Indiana is “an anthology of short fiction by multiple authors [that] creates a town through its characters,” (Kirkus Reviews).

The reading is free and open to the public and we hope to see you all there!!!

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. Martone’s books include “Winesburg, Indiana” (co-edited with Bryan Furuness), “Four for a Quarter”, “Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover”, “Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins”, a collection of essays, and “Double-wide”, his collected early stories, “Michael Martone”, a memoir in contributor’s notes, “Unconventions”, “Writing on Writing”, and “Rules of Thumb” (edited with Susan Neville). Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and current director of the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include “The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults” (2015), “Dead Youth, or, the Leaks” (2014),
“Salamandrine: 8 gothics” (2013), “Percussion Grenade” (2012), “Nylund, the Sarcographer” (2007), “Flet” (2007), “The Commandrine and Other Poems” (2004), and “The Red Bird” (2001). Her play “Dead Youth, or, the Leaks” won the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights. She is the co-founder of “Action Books” and “Action, Yes,” a press and web-quarterly dedicated to international writing and hybrid forms.

Kelcey Parker directs the creative writing program at Indiana University South Bend. She is the author of “Liliane’s Balcony”, a silver award winner for the IPPY, Foreword, and Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Her story collection, “For Sale By Owner”, won the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award in Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2012 Best Books of Indiana in Fiction. She is also the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission and a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

Valerie Sayers is a professor of fiction in the MFA Program and the University of Notre Dame, and is the author of six novels: “The Powers” (2013), “Brain Fever” (1996), “The Distance Between Us” (1994), “Who Do You Love” (1991), “How I Got Him Back, or, Under the Cold Moon’s Shine” (1989), and “Due East” (1987). “Brain Fever” and “Who Do You Love” were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year,” and the 2002 film “Due East” is based on her first two novels. Sayers is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.

– Tania

Join the Creative Writing Department for a fiction reading by our very own Valerie Sayers and visiting author Liam Callanan! Both writers will be reading from new books – THE POWERS and LISTEN. The reading is free and open to the public – all are welcome! – and takes place on September 30th, 7:30 pm, at the Hammes Bookstore

Valerie is a professor of fiction in the Notre Dame MFA Program, and is the author of six novels and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship. Her novels Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year,” and a film, “Due East,” was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back. 

Liam is the author of The Cloud Atlas, All Saints and Listen and is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He has regularly contributed to local and national public radio, and is possibly the only person now living (but consult your own Venn diagram) who has written for all of the following: the Wall Street Journal, The Awl, Medium, Commonweal,Esquire.com, Slate, the New York Times Book Review, the Times op-ed page, the Washington Post Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes FYI, Good Housekeeping, Parents, Milwaukee Magazine and elsewhere.

We hope to see you there.

– Tania

Want to hear a writer read some cool fiction? Want to hang out with writers and poets of all different stripes?

Then come to the Hammes Bookstore at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, September 9!

Jac Jemc, visiting professor of fiction at the ND Creative Writing program and prize-winning author of two collections, will read from her new short story collection, A Different Bed Every Time (Dzanc Books). A Different Bed Every Time was chosen as one of Amazon Best Books of 2014 (short stories) and Jemc’s first novel was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award.

This reading is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Don’t miss out.

– Tania