Creative Writing Events

Spring 2011 Visiting Writers Series 

The MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Southern Connecticut State University announce the Spring 2011 Visiting Writers Series. The series brings writers and poets to campus to read from their work. All readings are free and open to the public.  

Wed., Feb. 23
Reading, 8 p.m.
Engleman A120
Brian Johnson, Poetry and Visual Art (details to follow)
Brian Johnson, a professor of English At Southern, was the 2010 recipient of the Faculty Scholar Award. He was chosen based on his book Torch Lake & Other Poems (Del Sol Press, 2008). Torch Lake, Johnson's first full-length poetry collection, was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, one of the most prestigious first book awards in American poetry. The Farber Award was established by the family and friends of Norma Farber, poet and author of children's books, for a first book of original poetry written by an American.

Johnson has become known for his work in prose poetry, a hybrid genre that shares properties of poetry and prose. Poet Richard Deming of Yale University praises Torch Lake as "a major achievement [that] offers new ways of seeing the possibilities of prose poems." Poet Joshua Harmon of Vassar College says, "Johnson's writing has been notable for its refusal to yield to current literary fashion; like the quiet-but-insistent voice speaking throughout Torch Lake, Johnson has steadily followed his own star for years, and has in the process created an important body of work."

Johnson has published widely in journals and anthologies and other publications, and he has a chapbook, Self-Portrait, published in 2000. He has given a number of conference papers, workshops and poetry readings around the country and internationally. He is editor of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics and teaches a variety of undergraduate writing courses.

Wed., March 9
Reading, 8 p.m.
Engleman D253
National Book Award Finalist Marilyn Nelson (photo ⌐ Fran Funk)
Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 26, 1946, to Melvin M. Nelson, a U.S. serviceman in the Air Force, and Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, a teacher. Brought up first on one military base and then another, Nelson started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her B.A. from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1970) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1979). Her books include The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the 1997 National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award; Magnificat (1994); The Homeplace (1990), which won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award; Mama's Promises (1985); and For the Body (1978); all published by Louisiana State University Press. She has also published two collections of verse for children: The Cat Walked through the Casserole and Other Poems for Children (with Pamela Espeland, 1984) and Halfdan Rasmussen's Hundreds of Hens and Other Poems for Children (1982), which she translated from Danish with Pamela Espeland. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award. Since 1978 she has taught at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she is a professor of English.

Mon., March 28
Reading, 8 p.m.
Engleman D253
National Book Award Finalist Brad Watson
Brad Watson, born to Robert Earl Watson and Bonnie Clay Watson in Meridian, Mississippi, on July 24, 1955, published his first work, a collection of short stories called Last Days of the Dog-Men, and won a Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

However, Watson did not start out to become a writer.  He  was a high-school student/actor who married the summer of his junior year in high school. At seventeen, after graduating from high school, Brad Watson left Mississippi with the hope of making a name for himself in Hollywood. His stay in Hollywood, however, was not long because there was a strike. After finding work only as a garbage man (which was a job he loved because of the solitude it provided him), Watson came home to Meridian where he got a job as a carpenter.

Finally, after some persuasion from his family, Watson enrolled at Meridian Junior College, a turning point in Watson's life. Because he scored high on the entrance English exam, he was placed in an Honors English class. Although Watson had no previous interest in writing, this class turned him on.

Watson decided to further his education at Mississippi State University in 1976 by majoring in English. During Watson's first summer at Mississippi State, he wrote his first short story. In 1978, after graduating from Mississippi State with a bachelor's degree in English, Watson enrolled at the University of Alabama where he pursued a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and American Literature. He then moved to the Alabama gulf coast to work as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. He also worked as an editor at the Montgomery Advertiser and spent a year in an ad agency before returning to Tuscaloosa to teach in 1988. He moved there with his wife and three-year-old son and taught creative writing at the University of Alabama.

Before he completed Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories by Brad Watson in 1996, Watson had also worked in the University of Alabama public relations office for four years. Watson says the inspiration for writing stories about dogs and people came from his childhood.  He said everyone he knew had a dog and he related the dog's personality with the owners.

Returning to full time teaching, Watson moved to Harvard in 1997 to teach. He taught there until his second book, a novel called Heaven of Mercury, was published in 2002 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Following the publication of his novel, he took visiting writer-in-residence positions at the University of West Florida, the University of Alabama, Ole Miss (as Grisham Writer-in-Residence), and the University of California, Irvine. In 2005 Brad Watson began teaching at the University of Wyoming in the MFA program where he continues to teach in 2009.

A new book, a novella and stories titled Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, was published by W.W. Norton (also the publishers of his first two books) in March 2010. These stories have been published in The Oxford American, The Yalobusha Review, Greensboro Review, Idaho Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Thurs., April 14
Reading, 8 p.m
Engleman D253
Bruce Machart with poet Benjamin Grossberg
Bruce Machart is the author of the novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in October of 2010, and a forthcoming collection of short stories entitled Men in the Making, due out from HMH in 2011. His fiction has been published in some of the country's finest literary magazines, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Story, One Story, Five Points, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. His short stories have been anthologized in Best Stories of the American West and Descant: Fifty Years. The winner of numerous awards and fellowships, Machart is a graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University.

A native Texan, Machart was born and raised in the Houston area. His father grew up on a cash-crop farm in rural south Texas not far from the Lavaca County landscape of The Wake of Forgiveness, and his mother was born in the deep south (and named her son after her favorite little town: Bruce, Mississippi). After high school, Machart worked his way through eight years of undergraduate study before leaving for the midwest and graduate work in Columbus, Ohio. He later spent three years in the Boston area, where he taught literature and writing at Berklee College of Music, Boston University, and Grub Street Writers. In 2003, he returned to Houston, where he joined the faculty of Lone Star College. He is at work on a second novel.

Benjamin S. Grossberg is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa Press, 2009), winner of the Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007), winner of the Snyder Prize. A chapbook, The Auctioneer Bangs His Gavel, was published by Kent State in 2006.  He teaches creative writing at the University of Hartford and serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor and book reviewer for The Antioch Review.  His third full-length collection, Space Traveler, will be published by the University of Tampa Press in 2013. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, New England Review, Southwest Review, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Work is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, and the 2011 edition of the Best American Poetry anthology.