Events
November 2009
Frances Hwang, author of Transparency
Monday, Nov. 23 at 7:30 p.m.
Third-floor Bridge of Wiekamp
Frances Hwang’s story collection, Transparency (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Company, 2007), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University. Her work has been read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space and has appeared in Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Tin House, AGNI Online, and Subtropics. She teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.
October 2009
Darrin Doyle, author of Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story
Tuesday, October 13 at 7:00 p.m.
Third-floor Bridge of Wiekamp
About the Book:
Darrin Doyle’s Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story is a comic novel about love, memory, obesity, adjectives, top-ten lists, fish, and murder. A black comedy in the vein of A Confederacy of Dunces, Revenge follows two middle-agers as they struggle through life.
Doyle’s debut tells the story of Dale Portwit and Mary Ann Tucker, two fragile middle-aged teachers who feel that the peak of life has come and gone. After a failed suicide attempt, Mr. Portwit begins a whirlwind courtship with Mary Ann that leads to wedding bands, a house in the suburbs, and an indulgent love life – but not happiness. Perhaps all that this marriage needs to revitalize itself is a little revenge.
About the Author:
Darrin Doyle’s fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Long Story, Cottonwood, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. He has received the Border Tuition Scholarship for the New York Summer Writers’ Institute and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is an assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University and lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with his wife and two sons.
April 2009
Susan Choi
Saturday, April 11, 2009 in 1001 Wiekamp Hall
3:30-4:30 informal Q & A open to IUSB students, 1270 Wiekamp
7:00 p.m. Awards Ceremony and Fiction Reading by Susan Choi
Reception with book signing and debut of 2009 Analecta to follow
This event is free and open to the public
Susan Choi was born in South Bend, Indiana, and raised there and in Houston, Texas. She studied literature at Yale and writing at Cornell, and worked for several years as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. With David Remnick she co-edited the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, and her non-fiction has appeared in publications including Vogue, Tin House, Allure, O and The New York Times and in anthologies including Money Changes Everything and Brooklyn Was Mine. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Pete Wells, and their sons Dexter and Elliot.
A Person of Interest
Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician nearing retirement age, would seem the last person likely to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a popular young colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee’s detached response and maladroit behavior lead the FBI, the national news media, and even his own neighbors to regard him with damning suspicion.
Amid campus-wide grief over the murder, Lee receives a cryptic letter from a figure out of his past. The letter unearths a lifetime of shortcomings – toward his dead wife, his estranged only daughter, and a long-denied son. Caught between his guilty recollections and the scrutiny of the murder investigation, determined to face his tormentor and exonerate himself, Lee sets off on a journey that will bring him face-to-face with his past – and that might even win him redemption.
March 2009
Ashley Capps
Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Ashley Capps received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book of poems, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, was published in 2006. New poems appear in the current issues of Granta and Black Warrior Review, and are forthcoming in H_NGM_N and Columbia Poetry Review. She is working on a second collection of poems entitled Then Self.
February 2009
Michael Dumanis
Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2009 at 7:00 p.m. Location: Third Floor “Bridge” of Wiekamp Hall
Michael Dumanis teaches literature and creative writing at Cleveland State University, where he serves as Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and edits the books in their poetry and novella series. His first collection of poems, My Soviet Union won the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press and appeared in Spring 2007. He is also the coeditor, with poet Cate Marvin, of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and the Section Editor for the poetries of Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Russia, and Slovakia in the forthcoming Graywolf Press anthology The New European Poets, edited by Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller. His poems have appeared in such journals as Conduit, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, and Verse, and his writing has been recognized with a Fulbright Fellowship (to Bulgaria), a James Michener Fellowship in Fiction, and fellowships to Yaddo and the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference.
September 2008
Lily Hoang signs a copy of her debut novel, Parabola,
for IU South Bend English Graduate Student Naoko Fujimoto
April 2008
English Department Writing Awards Ceremony and Reading by Brock Clarke
Saturday, April 19, 7:00, Northside 158
The English Department award evening will be held on Saturday, April 19, 2008, at 7:00 p.m. in Northside 158. English writing awards, including the Lester M. Wolfson Poetry Award, will be presented.
There will be a reading by the awards judge, Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which has been critically acclaimed by The New York Times and Washington Post, and cited as a Critic's Choice in People Magazine. His other books include The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won't Do, and Carrying the Torch. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. A reception and book signing will follow the reading. The event is free and open to the public.
March 2008
Open Mic sponsored by the English Club
March 20, 6:30, Wiekamp Hall, 3rd Floor Lounge
Erik Reece, creative nonfiction (Lost Mountain)
March 18, 6:00, Wiekamp Hall, DW 1001
Erik Reece teaches writing at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His work appears in Harper's, Orion, and The Oxford American, among other publications. He was the recipient of the Sierra Club's David R. Brower Award, and his Harper's story on which Lost Mountain is based won the Columbia University School of Journalism's 2005 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism.
February 2008
Greg Rappleye, poet; recent collection is Figured Dark
http://sonnetsat4am.blogspot.com/
February 28, 7:00, Wiekamp Hall, Third Floor Bridge
The biography from his blog notes: "I am a poet who lives and works in West Michigan. I am a graduate of Albion College and the University of Michigan Law School. I am also a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. I have published three full-length collections of poetry: Holding Down the Earth (Sky Books, 1995), A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) which won the Brittingham Prize, and Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), which won the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series. My work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Review Literary Award in Poetry, and the Arts & Letters Prize. I was a Bread Loaf Fellow in 2002. When not writing, I work full-time as corporation counsel for a local government and also teach part-time in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan."
January 2008
Sam Sheridan Reading
January 30, 7:00 p.m., Thrid Floor Lounge, Wiekamp HallSam Sheridan, author of the memoir, A Fighter's Heart
Same Sheridan, author of the memoir, A Fighter's Heart, will be giving a reading. To learn more about the book, visit
http://www.myspace.com/fightersheart
ANALECTA OPEN-MIC
Thursday Jan. 17, 6:30 p.m., Wiekamp Hall, Third Floor Lounge
Emcee: Vince Bauters, Analecta editor
Analecta will continue to accept SUBMISSIONS for this year's issue. Information at http://www.iusb.edu/~analecta/guidelines.htm
Please also check out the new IU South Bend Creative Writing Blog for events and program updates.
Email Kelcey Parker at parkerk@iusb.edu for further information.
