| All readings take place at the
Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, at 4:00 pm |
| 9.22.01 |
Lou McKee Benefit
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Natalie Anderson is a Professor of English Literature
and the Director of the Program in Creative Writing at Swarthmore College.
Her first collection of poems, Following Fred Astaire, was the 1998 winner
of the Washington Prize, awarded by The Word Works. Nathalie Anderson's
poems have appeared in such journals as APR's Philly Edition,
Xconnect, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Madison Review,
Nimrod, Spazio Humano, and Paris Review. She was the librettist for the
opera The Black Swan, a collaboration with the composer Thomas Whitman,
which premiered in the fall of 1998 in a production directed by Sarah
Caldwell. Nathalie Anderson was a fellow at Yaddo in 1986, and in 1993 she
was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. |
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Deb Burnham currently works at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first
collection Anna and the Steel Mill won the FIrst Book Award of the
Press. She is a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grant, &
chairs the summer writing program at the PA Governor's School for the
Arts. |
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Melisa Cahnmann has poems published or forthcoming in
national literary magazines such as APR, Quarterly West, Barrow Street,
River City, Bridges, Laurel Review, and Red Rock Review. She was a prize
winner in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Contest on Jewish experience
(2000), a Leeway Foundation Grant winner for poetry and the Peter Mayer
Scholarship recipient to the 2001 Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Currently, she teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and Arcadia
University. An ultimate frisbee player, Salsa dancer and chocolate chip
cookie fan, she will soon take these addictions to the University of
Georgia where she will be assistant professor of Language and Education in
January 2002.
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| 9.29.2001 |
Warren Wilson Group Reading
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A very special group meeting of area graduates of the Warren Wilson MFA Writing program--
An afternoon of poetry by graduates with local poet Eleanor Wilner, who has been
associated with Warren Wilson's program for many years. The readers
include: Katherine Barham, Mary Lynn Ellis, Ken Hart, Charles Mann Elaine
Terranova & J. C. Todd.
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| 10.20.2001 |
Valerie Martínez and Julianna Baggott |
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Valerie Martínez’s first book of poems,
Absence, Luminescent (Four Way Books, 1999), won the Larry Levis
Prize and received a Greenwall Grant from the Academy of American Poets.
Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including
Parnassus, Puerto del Sol, LUNA, The Bloomsbury Review, Solo, Prairie
Schooner, The Colorado Review and The Best American Poetry
1996. Her work currently appears in American Poetry: Next
Generation; New American Poetry: A Breadloaf Anthology; and
Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance
(Anchor/Doubleday, 1998);. Along with Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, she
edited the anthology Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary
Native Women's Writing of North America (Norton, 1997). Martínez is
translating the work of Uruguay’s Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) and her
translations of Agustini and Mexico’s Miguel Mendez have appeared in a
number of journals. She has degrees from Vassar College (B.A.) and the
University of Arizona (M.F.A.). She has taught writing at universities in
Arizona and New Mexico, and in the rural schools of Swaziland. She is
currently on the English faculty at Ursinus College in Collegeville,
Pennsylvania. |
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Julianna Baggott received her MFA from the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991. The recipient of fellowships
from the Delaware Division of Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative
Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, she has
placed poems and short stories in dozens of literary journals including
Poetry, The Southern Review, Chelsea, Cream City Review, Quarterly West,
as well as the acclaimed anthology Best American Poetry
2000. Her novel, Girl Talk, was published by Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books
in February 2001. Girl Talk has also been published by six publishing houses overseas.
Her collection of poems, This Country of Mothers was released in April 2001,
published by Southern Illinois University Press. Her second novel, The Miss America Family,
will also be published by Pocket Books in April 2002, and her third novel, The Madam, will follow
in 2003. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry,
The Southern Review, Ms. Magazine, and Best America Poetry 2000.
She lives in Delaware with her husband, poet David G.W. Scott
and their three young children.
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| 11.17.2001 |
Leslie Anne Mcilroy and Aaren Yeats Perry
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Leslie Anne Mcilroy is assistant editor for Creative Nonfiction and managing
editor/cofounder of HEArt - Human Equity Through Art - the nonprofit
publisher of HEArt, the nation’s only journal of contemporary
literature and art devoted to confronting discrimination and promoting social justice.
Her awards include the Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length poetry
collection Rare Space, July 2001; the Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her
chapbook Gravel; and first place in the Chicago Literary Awards
Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Leslie's poems have been published in
numerous journals and anthologies including American Poetry: The Next Generation,
Henry’s Creatures: Poems & Stories About the Automobile, the Emily Dickinson Award Anthology,
the Eclectic Literary Forum, The Ledge, Main Street Rag, The MacGuffin, The Mississippi Review,
The Pittsburgh City Paper, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Pittsburgh Quarterly and Potpourri.
Her poems are forthcoming in Harpweaver and the Red Brick Review. |
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Aaren Yeats Perry was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1962. He moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in
1982 to work as a poet, researcher/writer and teacher. Since then, Philadelphia has
been his home and base of operations for local, national and international professional
projects. He studied directly with a number of writers including James Baldwin,
Jared Carter, Mark Doty, Etheridge Knight, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sonia Sanchez.
He says "I write love and pastoral poetry as well as a poetry of conscience that allows
the reader to confront injustice on a personal level. While my work is predominantly narrative,
I work with the silence between the words to create music with poetry." He teaches poetry and
writing to all ages at schools and colleges throughout the mid-Atlantic region.
He has published in Critique Magazine, Mad Poets Review,Tyme Anthology, Xconnect, Magazine,
Blue Guitar, Painted Bride Quarterly, Long Shot Review, and other magazines. His work
has appeared on National Public Radio and on regional television broadcasts. His
publications are POETRY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: An Action Guide for Elementary
Teachers (Allyn & Bacon, 1997), and a spoken word CD titled MERCURY CALLING (MelodyVision, 2000). |
| 12.08.2001 |
Alicia Askenase and Panna Naik
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Alicia Askenase is the director of literary programs at the Walt Whitman Cultural Art Center in Camden, New Jersey and a founding co-editor of the Philadelphia-based literary journal 6ix. Her book, The Luxury of Pathos, a “very subversive and honest deconstruction of love” was published by Texture Press. Her poetry has appeared in several journals, including The World, Synergism, Chain, The Journal of Modern Literature, Feminist Studies, and most recently in Rooms and 100 Days. She lives with her family in Moorestown, New Jersey. |
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Panna Naik, one of the leading Indian
feminist poets writing in Gujarati was born in Bombay and has been living
in the United States. She began writing poetry in 1972. Pravesh
(1976), Philadelphia (1980), Nisbat (1984), Arasparas (1989),
Avanjavan(1991), and Videshini (2000) are her six collections.
Pravesh was awarded the first prize by Gujarat government.
Pravesh, Philadelphia, Nisbat and
Avanjavan are required readings for undergraduate and graduate
programs by the SNDT University and its colleges all over India, while many of her
poems are found in school and college textbooks. Her poems appeared in
English translation in Massachusetts Review, Chandrabhaga, Journal of
South Asian Literature, and In Their Own Voice: The Penguin
Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women Poets (compiled and edited with an
introduction by Arlene R.K. Zide, New Delhi, Penguin, 1993).
She has also published short stories in various Gujarati literary journals. Her one story entitled “Political Engagement” is included in Odyssey - an anthology of short stories written by Indian women writers settled abroad, published in London by Nehru Center. The same story is also included in the Gujarati anthology of best stories of 1996. Her other stories are anthologized
in best short stories of 1997 and 1998. Image Publications Private Ltd., Bombay, will publish a collection of her short stories this year.
A librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Panna Naik holds three Masters degrees (M.A. in Gujarati and Sanskrit literature from University of Bombay, M.S. in Library Science from Drexel University in Philadelphia and M.S. in South Asian Studies from University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia). She also teaches two courses in Gujarati at the University of Pennsylvania to second generation Indian Americans who are curious about their cultural heritage and roots. |
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| 1.19.2002 |
Almitra David and Lia Purpura
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Almitra David was born in Pittsburgh in 1941. She studied for a year at the University of Madrid, received a B.A. in Spanish from Dickinson College in 1963, and an M.A. from Kutztown University in 1974. She currently teaches Spanish at Friends Select School in Philadelphia. Her poems and translations have been published in various journals. She has three publications: a chapbook, Building the Cathedral (1986 Slash & Burn Press), Between the Sea and Home(Eighth Mountain Press, 1993, and her most recent collection Impulse to Fly was published by Perugia Press in 1998. |
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Lia Purpura's collection of lyric essays, Increase, won the 1999 Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in October 2000. Her second collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, won the 2000 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award and was published in December 2000. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow, she has published poems, essays, translations and reviews in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Ploughshares. She is a regular poetry and nonfiction reviewer for Antioch Review.
In 1992, Lia Purpura was granted a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland to translate the work of four contemporary poets. A collection of her translations, Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 1998. Her first collection of poems, The Brighter the Veil, was published in 1996 by Orchises Press.
Purpura was awarded a Millay Colony Fellowship, multiple fellowship residencies at The MacDowell Colony, and at Blue Mountain Center. She is the winner of the Visions International Prize in Translation, the Randall Jarrell Prize for poetry given by the North Carolina Writers’ Network and chosen by Mary Oliver, and, for The Brighter the Veil, The Towson University Prize in Literature, given by Towson University in MD in recognition of a literary work published that year by a writer under 40. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize numerous times, including this year.
Recently, she was Poet-in-Residence at The Chautauqua Institute and at The St. Mary’s Poetry Festival, St. Mary’s MD, a featured reader at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Palm Springs, CA, and a guest reader/lecturer at the First Annual Writers’ Conference at the University of North Carolina. She has served as judge for the AWP Intro Journals Award in Creative Nonfiction, and for the Gertrude Lucille Robinson Award for best undergraduate writing at Ohio State University.
Lia Purpura teaches writing at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD, where she lives with her husband and son. |
| 2.16.2002 |
Anne Colwell and Martha Rhodes
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Anne Colwell is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware Parallel
Program in Georgetown. Her book, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the
Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1997. Her first book of poems, Believing Their Shadows, has been a finalist for the University of Wisconsin's Brittingham Prize, the Anhinga Prize, New Issues Poetry Prize and the
Quarterly Review of Literature. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including, most recently, California Quarterly, Evansville Review, Phoebe, Eclectic Literary Forum, Southern Poetry Review, and Writer's Voice. Poetry is also at the heart of her research interests and she has published several essays concerning American poets, including an article in Conneticut Review on Anne Bradstreet and Affliction/Conversion Narrative and an article in Journal X about Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish." She lives in Milton, Delaware.
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Martha Rhodes is the author of two poetry collections: Perfect Disappearance (winner of the 2000 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts Press, 1995). Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Aizenberg and Belieu, eds. Columbia University Press, 2001); The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (Michael Collier ed. University Press of New England, 2000); The KGB Bar Book of Poems (Lehman and Black, eds. Harper Collins, 2000); Last Call (Gorham and Skinner, eds. Sarabande, 1997), Urban Nature (Bosselaar, ed., Milkweed Edition, 2000). Her poems have appeared individually in many journals including Agni, American Poetry Review, Fence, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and others. She teaches Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston and New School University in New York City, and was a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Irvine in 2001. She is a Founding Editor and the Director of Four Way Books, an independent literary press which also features established and emerging writers through The CCS Reading Series. She lives in NYC with her husband.
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| 3.23.2002 |
Moira Burns and Lia Purpura
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Moira Burns is a poet and non-fiction writer. Her work has been published in
Poet Lore, Calvert Review, Architectural Digest, and Potomac Review. She
serves as the Director and Host of The Word Works/Strathmore Hall Arts
Center/Cafe Muse Literary Reading series in Bethesda, Maryland, and presents
a monthly writers' reading series at the Mariposa Center for Artistic
Expression in College Park, Maryland. She has taught creative writing
seminars at Gallaudet University and at University College/University of
Maryland, where she received her B.A. in English Literature/Humanties in
1982.
She has given readings of her work at various Washington-metropolitan area
venues, including: the University of Maryland, Gallaudet University, the
Folger Library and Phillips Collection (under the Mid-day Muse Series), and
the Joaquin Miller Cabin series. She will be a featured reader at the
Cornelia Street Cafe Reading Series in NYC in December 2001.
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Lia Purpura's collection of lyric essays, Increase, won the 1999 Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in October 2000. Her second collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, won the 2000 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award and was published in December 2000. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow, she has published poems, essays, translations and reviews in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Ploughshares. She is a regular poetry and nonfiction reviewer for Antioch Review.
In 1992, Lia Purpura was granted a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland to translate the work of four contemporary poets. A collection of her translations, Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 1998. Her first collection of poems, The Brighter the Veil, was published in 1996 by Orchises Press.
Purpura was awarded a Millay Colony Fellowship, multiple fellowship residencies at The MacDowell Colony, and at Blue Mountain Center. She is the winner of the Visions International Prize in Translation, the Randall Jarrell Prize for poetry given by the North Carolina Writers’ Network and chosen by Mary Oliver, and, for The Brighter the Veil, The Towson University Prize in Literature, given by Towson University in MD in recognition of a literary work published that year by a writer under 40. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize numerous times, including this year.
Recently, she was Poet-in-Residence at The Chautauqua Institute and at The St. Mary’s Poetry Festival, St. Mary’s MD, a featured reader at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Palm Springs, CA, and a guest reader/lecturer at the First Annual Writers’ Conference at the University of North Carolina. She has served as judge for the AWP Intro Journals Award in Creative Nonfiction, and for the Gertrude Lucille Robinson Award for best undergraduate writing at Ohio State University.
Lia Purpura teaches writing at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD, where she lives with her husband and son. |
| 4.20.2002 |
Nancy Mitchell and Mary Brownell
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Nancy Mitchell teaches Creative Writing in the English Department and Honors Program at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland and is guest lecturer for Delmarva Discussions on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. She has received grants from the Artist in the Schools Programs in Arlington, Virginia and a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweetbrier, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Marlboro Review, Salt Hill Journal, Louisville Review, North Atlantic Review, Last Call, an anthology by Sarabande Books and on the Poetry Society American website Poetry Daily. The Near Surround, her first book of poetry, is forthcoming from Four Way Books Spring 2002. She lives in Salisbury, Maryland.
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Mary Brownell received a Leeway Foundation grant for her poetry in 2001. She has also received a PA Council on the Arts fellowship in poetry. She has published
poems in The American Poetry Review, Comstock Review, and Red Rock Review, among others. |
| 5.4.2002 |
David Dodd Lee and Robin Hiteshew
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David Dodd Lee is the author of three books of poems: Arrow Pointing North
(Four Way Books, 2002), Wilderness (March Street Press, 2000) and Downsides
of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997).
He has published poems and essays in CutBank, Many Mountains Moving, The
Quarterly, American Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Sycamore Review, Green Mountains Review, Willow Springs, Cream City Review and elsewhere.
He has been poetry editor for Passages North and Third Coast Magazine,
Western Michigan University's literary magazine, where he received the MFA in
creative writing in 1993, and a BFA in painting in 1986.
He has worked as a park ranger, fisheries technician, papermaker, and in
redistribution in a hospital. He has also taught English, Creative Writing and Art History
at his Alma Mater, where he is now Associate Editor of New Issues Press.
He is currently working as a freelance editor and as an art, television and
movie critic for the Kalamazoo Gazette.
He has completed a novel, Flood, and a fourth manuscript of poems,
Air-Conditioned Silver. |
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Robin Hiteshew lives in Philadelphia and was educated at Temple and Case
Western Reserve Universities. He studied writing with Henry Braun. His
chapbook A Germantown Sequence was published in 1996. He has given
numerous readings in the Philadelphia area. His poems have appeared in
many journals. He also recently published in an Irish journal, Dearcadh. In January 1998 he established the Laughing
Hermit Press and the
Laughing Hermit Reading and Poetry Series, in Philadelphia. He also is
an avid photographer.
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