MFA Creative Writing

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

Eleven wondrous voices, one literary night. Graduating students of the MFA in Creative Writing at Notre Dame (four poets, along with six prose writers) will be reading five-minute selections from their final thesis. Join us as we celebrate their accomplishments and wish them more to come on Thursday April 23^rd, 2015 at 7:00 PM in the Regis Philbin Studio Theater.

Jace Brittain lives in Los Angeles or Berlin or Indiana, even Bemidji sometimes. His writing has appeared in Deluge, the Destroyer, and elsewhere.

Paul Cunningham manages Radioactive Moat Press and its lit journal, Deluge. He also works as an editor for Fanzine and Action Books. His writing has appeared in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Tarpaulin Sky, LIT, and Witness.

Jonathan Diaz is a poet from Los Angeles, a city whose complexity undergirds and informs his work. He also spent a term at Oxford University, where he studied poetry and philosophy. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the online literary journal Californios.

Suzi F. Garcia writes about feelings, feminism, and race. She is a Gender Studies minor, and an assistant editor at Noemi Press. She was nominated for an Intro Journals Award by the University of Notre Dame. Her work can be found in the Yalobusha Review, the Pinch, Barely South, and more.

Julia Harris grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  In 2013, she graduated from Saint Mary’s College with a B.A. in English Literature and English Writing. She was on the editorial board for Chimes, and had works published there, and The Avenue, a literary journal for creative non-fiction.

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Burma (Myanmar) and lived in Bangkok, Thailand for seven years before immigrating with her family to San Jose, California. Thirii attended Brown University, where she studied Literary Arts and had many adventures. Her writing has been published in Caketrain, The Kenyon Review Online, The Literarian, and The Bicycle Review.

Jessica Newman’s writing has appeared in elimae, Caketrain,Unsaid, PANK and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book that, by combining fiction with nonfiction, lives in both the future and the past.

Sarah Roth writes between the archive and the catacomb, bridging text and movement, community arts pedagogy and social advocacy, museum and studio. Her writing has appeared in Spires and is forthcoming in Documenting Life and Destruction and MAKE. She is often in transit.

Garret Travis received his BA in English from Louisiana State University. He is interested in snakes, underground rooms, and the proliferation of media through/in writing.

DH Varma’s work has been published in Oxford American Magazine, Mikrokosmos, the Barely South Review, and elsewhere. Currently, he is juggling a few multi-genre projects probing notions of family, his hometown (Memphis, TN), and various talismans.

Rachel Zavecz’s work often straddles the genres of fantasy and science fiction while engaging modern culture and attempting to push poetic form and performance in new directions. She was a finalist and honorable mention for the 2014 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Award with a feature forthcoming in the 2015 Mauve Issue.

The reading is free and open to the public. Tickets will be available at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. We hope to see you there!

Kyle Muntz