JANUARY 2014 WRITERS FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
[All events free and open to the
public. All events in the Center for Lifelong Learning Common Room unless
noted.]
Saturday, January 4, 6 p.m. Natalie Diaz & Jon Davis
Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California.
After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she
completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She has
been awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the
2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan
Residency and the 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her first book, When
My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in June 2012 by Copper Canyon Press.
The winner of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley,
Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her
home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of
the Mojave language.
Jon Davis, Director of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing, is the author of
four chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry—Preliminary
Report (Copper Canyon Press 2010), Scrimmage of Appetite,
for which he received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous
Amusements, for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the
Lavan Prize. He has also received two NEA Fellowships, a Lannan Residency, a
Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and a residency at Cill Rialaig in Ireland.
He has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts since 1990 and is
currently Santa Fe Poet Laureate.
Sunday, January 5, 6 p.m. Chris Merrill & Melissa Febos
Christopher Merrill has published six books of poetry, including Watch Fire,
for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of
American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works
of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the
Balkan Wars and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy
Mountain. His latest prose book, The Tree of the Doves:
Ceremony, Expedition, War, chronicles his travels in Malaysia, China and
Mongolia, and the Middle East, in the wake of the war on terror. His
writings have been translated into twenty-five languages; his journalism
appears widely; his honors include a knighthood in arts and letters from the
French government. A member of the National Council on the Humanities and the
U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, he directs the International Writing
Program at the University of Iowa.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart (St.
Martin’s Press, 2010). Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in
publications including Glamour, Salon, Dissent, New
York Times, Kenyon Review, Post Road, Bitch
Magazine, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, The Portland Review, The
Brooklyn Rail, and The Chronicle of Higher Education
Review. She has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, Anderson
Cooper Live, and elsewhere. The winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner
Creative Nonfiction prize, she is the recipient of a 2012 Bread Loaf nonfiction
fellowship, and 2010 & 2011 MacDowell Colony fellowships. Melissa is
currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and
MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts
(IAIA). A member of the board of directors for VIDA, Women in Literary Arts,
she grew up on Cape Cod, and lives in Brooklyn.
Monday, January 6, 6 p.m. Gabrielle Calvocoressi & Ramona Ausubel
Gabrielle Calvocoressi's first book, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea
Books, 2005), was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won
the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Apocalyptic
Swing (Persea Books, 2009), was a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles
Times Book Prize. Calvocoressi's awards and honors include a Stegner
Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Women
Writers' Award. Her poem "Circus Fire, 1944" received The
Paris Review's Bernard F. Connors Prize. She teaches at the MFA programs at
California College of Arts in San Francisco and at Warren Wilson College. She
also runs the sports desk for the Best American Poetry Blog.
Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One is Here Except All of Us,
winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, the VCU Cabell First
Novelist Award and finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction
Award. The novel was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a San Francisco
Chronicle and Huffington Post Best Book of the Year. Her new collection
of stories, A Guide to Being Born, was also a New York Times
Editors’ Choice and was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story
Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review
Daily, One Story, The Best American Fantasy and shortlisted in The
Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required
Reading.
Tuesday, January 7, 6 p.m. Joan Kane & Chip Livingston
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska.
She received a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award for her first poetry
collection, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, published in its first
edition by NorthShore Press Alaska and in its second edition by the University
of Alaska Press. Her second book, Hyperboreal, was chosen as
the winner of the 2012 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was published by the
University of Pittsburgh Press. She has received an individual artist award
from the Rasmuson Foundation, a fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the
Arts, the Alaska Conservation Foundation’s Native Writers on the Environment
award, a Literature Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.
She is the School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence for
2014.
Chip Livingston is the mixed blood author of the mixed genre collection Naming
Ceremony, forthcoming in February from Lethe Press. He’s also published two
poetry collections – Crow-Blue, Crow-Black and Museum
of False Starts. Chip has received writing awards from Native Writers’
Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers,
the AABB Foundation and University of Colorado. Chip divides his time between
Montevideo, Uruguay, and Lakewood, Colorado.
Wednesday, January 8, 6 p.m. Sherwin Bitsui & Ken White
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation.
He is Dine of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani
(Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University
of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press,
2009). His recent honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship
and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the
recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting
Writers Award.
Ken White is a poet and screenwriter who divides his time between Montana
and Southern California and teaches Screenwriting in the MFA program at
Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He co-wrote and co-produced the
feature film Winter in the Blood, and has adapted Debra
Earling's Perma Red for the screen, which he is attached to
direct. He is currently adapting the YA novel Stolen for the
screen with Lucy Christopher. He is the author of one book of poems, Eidolon (Peel
Press 2013).
Thursday, January 9, 6 p.m. Linda Hogan & Santee Frazier *In IAIA Auditorium*
Linda Hogan, Writer in Residence for The Chickasaw Nation, is an internationally
recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, screenplay, and
essays. Her books include Rounding the Human Corners, a
Pulitzer nominee; People of the Whale; Mean Spirit, a
winner of the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Solar Storms, a finalist for the
International Impact Award, and Power, also a finalist for the
International Impact Award in Ireland. WW Norton has published her fiction. In
poetry, The Book of Medicines was a finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry has received the Colorado Book
Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an American Book Award, and a Lannan
Fellowship. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,
a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native
Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and
Plains Booksellers Association.
Santee Frazier is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA
from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University.
He is the recipient of various awards including: a Syracuse University
Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, The School for Advanced
Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and a 2013-14 Native Arts and Cultures
Foundation Literature Fellowship. His poems have appeared in American
Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, Ploughshares, and other
literary journals. His first collection of poetry, Dark Thirty, was
published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009.
Thursday, January 9, 8:30 p.m. Student Showcase
Students in the Institute of American Indian Arts' Low Residency MFA Program will read from their works.
Friday,
January 10, 6 p.m. Sherman Alexie *In
IAIA Auditorium*
Fiction writer, poet,
performer, screenwriter, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur
d’Alene) is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, Blasphemy:
New and Selected Stories from Grove Press; War Dances, stories
and poems, from Grove Press; and Face, poetry, from Hanging Loose Press.
He is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, the
PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Award, PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in
the Short Story, American Book Award, and a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award.
He was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction. In 1999,
he was selected by The New Yorker as one of its “20 Writers for the 21st
Century” and, in 1996, Granta named him one of the “Twenty Best American
Novelists Under the Age of 40.”
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