All evening readings are organized and sponsored by UAA's Creative Writing & Literary Arts Department, Low-Residency MFA Program.

Readings are from 8-9:30 p.m., doors open at 7:30 p.m. All readings take place at UAA Fine Arts, room 150 except where noted. All readings are free and open to the public. Parking is free on campus after 7 p.m.

UAA's Campus Bookstore will be on-hand each evening to showcase and sell books authored by MFA faculty and special guest writers.

For more information, contact Kathleen Tarr, MFA Program Coordinator at (907) 786-4394 or afkt1@uaa.alaska.edu.

Reading Schedule

Kim Addonizio, keynote author reading
Sunday, July 11, 8 p.m.
UAA Fine Arts, room 150

Kim Addonizio's fifth poetry collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, was recently published by W.W. Norton. Her collection Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist.

Addonizio has also authored two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton.

Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback in July 06. Little Beauties was chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, her second novel, was released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.

She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby; a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Cheryl Dumesnil.

Addonizio's awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals, and textbooks, including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bad Girls, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online.

Zack Rogow and Linda McCarriston
Monday, July 12, 8 p.m.
UAA Fine Arts, room 150

Zack Rogow

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translater of eighteen books or plays.  His sixth book of poem, The Number Before Infinity, was published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2008.  His poems have appeared in a number of magazines from American Poetry Review to Zyzzyva.  He is the editor of anthology of U.S. Poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by University of California Press, 2005.  Currently, he teaches in the MFA Program at University of Alaska Anchorage.

Linda McCarriston
Linda McCarriston is the senior core faculty member and Professor of Poetry in UAA's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Linda McCarriston has received two literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two from the Vermont State Council on the arts. A winner of the Grolier Prize and the Consuelo Ford Prize from Poetry, she was awarded the poetry fellowship at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute) at Harvard for 1992-1993, after which she was named Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer in Washington at the George Washington University.

Her poetry books include: Little River New & Selected Poems; Eva-Mary; and Talking Soft Dutch.

Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Ohio Review, the Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner ( where she has work forthcoming), New England Review (which also solicited her oft-reprinted essay "The Grace of Form: Class Un consciousness and an American Writer" for a special issue on Class and American Writers), ICE-FLOE: An International Journal of Poetry of the Far North, Calyx, Kalliope, Sojourner, Sojouners, TriQuarterly, Poetry Ireland, and many others. She has read at Berkeley, Poets' House in NYC, The Library of Congress, and countless other sites around the country, is a featured poet in Bill Moyers' latest PBS Poetry Series, The Language of Life (her tape, with Sandra McPherson: "The Field of Time"), and has been twice interviewed by Terry Gross for Public Radio's Fresh Air.

In addition to poetry readings "on the circuit," she's read and spoken in prisons, public schools, family shelters, women's centers, and such gatherings as the Alaska Governor's Summit on the Neglect and Abuse of Children, as well as been invited to represent the United States and the English Language at the 2004 Festival de las Lenguas, in Mexico City. One of fourteen poets from the Americas, she was honored for her expression of solidarity and compassion for Native American women in the poem "Indian Girls," which caused great controversy in Alaska. Other poems, including "Le Coursier de Jeanne D'Arc" and "God the Synecdoche in His Holy Land," have also generated political controversy. McCarriston has been invited to contribute to panels and speaking series on subjects including women's history, American education, censorship and self-censorship, and her poems and prose are anthologized across a wide range of subject areas.

She lives in Rockport, Massachusetts, with the half-Arab (half-Morgan) mare, now 27 years old, that she has kept since the mare was 18 months old. Yes, even to and from Alaska, 1994 to 2006.

Ed Allen and Judith Barrington
Tuesday, July 13, 8 p.m.
UAA Fine Arts, room 150

Ed Allen
Ed Allen grew up in New England and in the suburbs of New York.  He received his undergraduate degree from Goddard College in Vermont in 1971, and attended the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in 1972.  He received his MA and his PhD from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  He has published two novels: Straight Through the Night and Mustang Sally.  That latter novel was made into the 2003 movie Easy Six (retitled in the Showtime DVD release as Easy Sex).  He is also the author of The Hands-On Fiction Workbook. His fiction and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, GQ, Story, Prairie Schooner, The Indiana Review, and River Styx.   His collection of short stories, Ate it Anyway, was a winner of the 2002 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.  His first collection of poetry, the sonnet sequence 67 Mixed Messages was published by Ahsahta Press in 2006. His latest project is The Cat Food Kid: A Novel in Limericks. A former three-day contestant on Jeopardy, he currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota. He is a new associate faculty member in UAA's MFA Program.

Judith Barrington
Judith Barrington is a memoirist and a poet. Her Lifesaving:A Memoir won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Her best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art is enormously popular with writing groups, university programs, and individual memoirists. Last year, her most recent poetry collection, Horses and the Human Soul was  selected by the Oregon State Library for "150 Books for the Sesquicentennial" (from among books by Oregon writers, 1836 – 2009). Lost Lands, a poetry chapbook recently won the Robin Becker Chapbook Award.

Her work has appeared in The Handbook of Creative Writing from Edinburgh University Press, The Stories That Shape Us: Twenty Women Write About the West, and many journals including Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, ZYZZVA, and The Chattahoochee Review.

Judith grew up in England and moved to the United States in 1976. For nine years she taught at schools in rural communities through Oregon's Arts in Education Program. She has been writer-in-residence at the Mark Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon, and served as President of the Soapstone Writing Retreat for ten years. She teaches regularly in England for the Arvon Foundation and in Spain for The Old Olive Press. Her awards include the Andrés Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dulwich Festival International Poetry Contest, and, with her partner, Ruth Gundle, the Stewart H. Holbrook Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon's literary life. Judith has been an associate faculty member in UAA's MFA Program for three years.

Craig Childs and Carolyn Turgeon
Wednesday, July 14, 8 p.m.
UAA Fine Arts, room 150

Craig Childs
Craig Childs is a writer who focuses on the relationship between humans and the landscape, often told from mind-blowing journeys in the wilderness. He is a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, Outside and Orion. His subjects range from pre-Columbian archaeology to US border issues to the last free-flowing rivers of Tibet and Patagonia. He has published more than a dozen books, including, The Secret Knowledge of Water, House of Rain, and Animal Dialogues. His new book, Finders Keepers, appears in August 2010.

The expeditions Childs undertake often last weeks or months, informing his writing with a hard-earned sense of landscape and culture. The New York Times says "Childs's feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he's a modern-day desert father." He has been called a "born storyteller" by the New York Sun, and the LA Times says his writing is "like pure oxygen," and "stings like a slap in the face." He has won several key awards including the 2009 Rowell Art of Adventure Award, the 2007 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and the 2003 Spirit of the West Award for his body of work, an honor he shares with Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams and N. Scott Momaday.

Carolyn Turgeon
Carolyn Turgeon was born in Michigan and grew up in Illinois, Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. After graduating from Penn State, she earned a Master's in Comparative Literature from UCLA, then spent several years in New York working as a writer and editor. Her first novel, Rain Village, was published in 2006 by Unbridled Books. Her second, Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story, was published in March 2009 by Three Rivers/Crown in the US and Headline in the UK. Her third novel, Mermaid, a retelling of the original little mermaid story, will come out in March 2011, and her first children's novel, about the daughter of a swan maiden, will come out in summer 2010. She lives in Pennsylvania and New York.

An evening with Red Hen Press (Los Angeles)
Alaskan poet Peggy Shumaker and Kate Gale, founder, Red Hen Press
Thursday, July 15, 8 p.m.

Peggy Shumaker
Peggy Shumaker's new book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She's currently working on a manuscript of poems set in Costa Rica. Shumaker lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Born in La Mesa, California, Peggy Shumaker grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She earned her B.A. in English and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Shumaker was writer in residence for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, working with prison inmates, honors students, gang members, deaf adults, teen parents, little kids, library patrons, and elderly folks. She has given readings in art galleries, a governor's mansion, a clearing in the woods, an abandoned bank, on reservations, in libraries, at a gold dredge, under the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon, on a riverboat, and at many bookstores, community centers, and universities.

Her poems have been published in Russia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, England, and throughout the United States. Her nonfiction has appeared in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton), A Road of Her Own (Fulcrum), Under Northern Lights (U. Washington Press), A Year in Place (U. Utah Press), Prairie Schooner, Brevity, and Ascent.

In 2008, Peggy founded Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press, to publish literature and fine art from Alaska. www.borealbooks.org.

Shumaker was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She has served as poet-in residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell and as the president of the board of directors of AWP. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the low-residency MFA Rainier Writing Workshop and at many writing conferences and festivals.

Kate Gale
Kate Gale, PhD, is the 2005-2006 President of PEN USA, and president of American Composers Forum/LA, Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor at The Los Angeles Review, as well as a writer of poetry, novels and librettos. She is a finalist judge for the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award given by Claremont Graduate University. She has founded or co-founded the Red Hen Press, The Los Angeles Review, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Series, the Geffen reading series, and a "Writers in the Schools" program for underserved communities. She acquired her PhD in literature from Claremont Graduate University and has published four books of poetry, a novel, a bilingual children's book, served as editor of three literary anthologies, and completed the libretto for the opera "Rio de Sangre" by Don Davis. A mother of two, Gale resides in Los Angeles. For more about Kate and Red Hen Press, visit: www.redhen.org.

MFA Students open-mic reading
Friday, July 16, 9-11 p.m.
UAA Gorsuch Commons, room 106

Special event: "Things I Didn't Know I Loved"
Saturday, July 17, 8 p.m.
UAA Rasmuson Hall, room 101

A theatrical reading of  "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" by Zack Rogow, directed by Dawson Moore, Coordinator of the Prince William Sound Community College--Last Frontier Theatre Conference. Discussion to follow.

Zack Rogow
Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of eighteen books or plays. His sixth book of poems, The Number before Infinity, was published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2008. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, from American Poetry Review to Zyzzyva. He is the editor of an anthology of U.S. poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by University of California Press in 2005. Currently he teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the California College of the Arts and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

Nancy Lord and Valerie Miner
Sunday, July 18, 8 p.m.
UAA Fine Arts, room 150

Nancy Lord
Nancy Lord, Alaska's current Writer Laureate, holds a liberal arts degree from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College.  In addition to being an independent writer based in Homer, she fished commercially for many years and has, more recently, worked as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships.

She is the author of three short fiction collections (most recently The Man Who Swam with Beavers, Coffee House Press, 2001) and four books of literary nonfiction (most recently Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life,University of Nebraska Press, 2009.)  Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed Northis forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in January 2011.  She teaches part-time at the Kachemak Bay Branch of Kenai Peninsula College and in the Low-Residency MFA graduate writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her awards include fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and residencies at a number of artist communities. See www.nancylord.alaskawriters.com.

Valerie Miner
Associate faculty member, Valerie Miner, is the award-winning author of thirteen books.  Her latest novel is After Eden.  Other novels include Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department.  Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage. In 2002, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a Finalist for the PEN USA Creative Non-Fiction Award.  Abundant Light was a 2005 Fiction Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.

Valerie Miner's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Conditions, The T.L.S., The Women's Review of Books, The Nation and other journals.  Her stories and essays are published in more than sixty anthologies. Her writings have been translated into eight languages. Valerie's collaborative work includes books, museum exhibits as well as theatre.  A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources.  She has received Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia. Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University.  She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops.  She and her partner live in San Francisco and Mendocino County, California. Her website is www.valerieminer.com.

Anne Caston, Rich Chiappone and Sherry Simpson
Monday, July 19, 8 p.m.
UAA Fine Arts, room 150

Anne Caston
Anne Caston's first book, Flying Out With The Wounded, won the 1996 New York University Press Prize in Poetry.  Her second collection, Judah's Lion, is now available in a second edition from Toad Hall Press (2009).  Anne is currently at work on a third collection of poems, The Empress Of Longing, and a memoir, Deep Dixie: A Southern Woman's Take on Life, Love, Friendship, Romance, Faith, and Coming-of-Age Among Southern Baptists.  She is also the New Acquisitions Book Designer for Toad Hall Press.Anne is core faculty in poetry in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage and divides her time between Alaska and Central Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two miscreant cats in Central Pennsylvania.

Rich Chiappone
Richard Chiappone received a BA in English at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 1991, and an MFA in creative writing there in 1994. He has published dozens of stories and essays in both commercial and literary magazines including Playboy, Gray's Sporting Journal, Alaska Magazine, Missouri Review, Crescent Review, Sou'wester, New Virginia Review, ZYZZYVA and others.

His collection of short stories Water of an Undetermined Depth was published in 2003.  One of the stories in the collection, "Raccoon" was made into an award winning short film featured at international film festivals including Aspen, Montreal, Palm Springs and others.  His story, "Uncommon Weather," which was read as part of UAA's Northern Renaissance Arts & Science reading series in summer 2008, was published in The Sun magazine in October 2009.

Rich's newest book, Opening Days, has just been published by Barclay Press, Bolton, Massachusetts .www.barclaycreek.com.

Here's what Gretchen Legler had to say about Opening Days:  "I loved Rich Chiappone's collection of essays, stories and poems—Opening Days—which is pretty weird coming from a lesbian feminist nature writer. In the genre of fishing stories macho men have dominated, but what makes Chiappone's work worth reading is that while it honors everything that is good and right about the conventional male fishing story, it gives the genre a much needed twist in the direction of self-awareness through emotional honesty and smart humor."

Chiappone lives in Anchor Point, Alaska where he teaches creative writing, and serves on the faculty of the annual Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference. He has been an associate faculty member in UAA's MFA Program for the past three years.  He has won writing awards including an Alaska Press Club award, and the John W. Voelker Award for short fiction.

Sherry Simpson
Associate Professor, Sherry Simpson, core faculty member in literary nonfiction, is the author of two collections of essays, The Way Winter Comes, and The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska.  Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Creative Nonfiction journal, Orion, Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, and In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. She is the winner of the inaugural Chinook Prize and the Andres Berger award for nonfiction, and she was a Bakeless Scholar at Breadloaf Writers' Conference.

She is working on a book about people and bears for the University Press of Kansas. Simpson is the core faculty member in literary nonfiction in UAA's Low-Residency MFA Program. She also teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University

Jo-Ann Mapson, Derick Burleson and David Stevenson
Tuesday, July 20, 8 p.m.
UAA Fine Arts, room 150

Jo-Ann Mapson
Jo-Ann Mapson grew up in Southern California, attended Johnston College at the University of Redlands, and received her B.A. in English/Creative Writing at California State University Long Beach with honors in Creative Writing. In 1992, she received her MFA in Writing at Vermont College in Montpelier where she completed thesis projects in both poetry and fiction.

Her students include writers Joyce Weatherford (Heart of the Beast), Judith Ryan Hendricks (Bread Alone) and bestselling mystery and mainstream author Earlene Fowler (The Saddlemaker's Wife). Her awards include The 1986 California Short Story Award for "The Red Nightie Network," later published in her story collection, Fault Line.  Her first novel, Hank & Chloe, was a semi-finalist for the Barnes & Noble inaugural Discover Great New Writers Award. Each of her novels have been Doubleday Book Club selections.  Two of her novels have been national bestsellers (The Wilder Sisters and Bad Girl Creek), and one was made into a movie for television (Blue Rodeo).  Her stories, personal essays and poems have been widely published and anthologized, most recently in Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North. Several of her novels have been BookSense 76 picks. Her literary papers are being collected in Boston University's Twentieth Century Writers "The Jo-Ann Mapson Collection."

Forthcoming in October 2010 from Bloomsbury USA is her new novel, Solomon's Oak, which will be published in the UK in November 2010, as well as in audio and large print.

She is Assistant Professor on the core faculty of UAA's Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she is completing a new novel.

Derick Burleson
Derick Burleson is the author of two books of poems: Never Night (Marick Press, 2007) and Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among other journals. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska—Fairbanks and lives in Two Rivers.  He's also an associate faculty member in the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA.

David Stevenson
David Stevenson is the director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department and the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA.  He has been teaching creative writing for over twenty years at the University of Utah, University of California Davis, and at Western Illinois University where he was full professor and director of the Graduate Program in English.

He was educated in the west at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (BA '78) and the University of Utah (Ph.D. '94).  He writes often about the mountaineering experience both in fiction and nonfiction prose and has published widely in journals such as Ascent, Alpinist, Isotope, and Weber Studies, as well as in The American Alpine Journal where he has been book review editor since 1996.

Recently he contributed to Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska (University of Alaska Press); Alpinist; and Cimarron Review.  David recently finished a novel:  Forty Crows, is set in Mexico City in the early 1970s.