English Department Reading Series

The English Department Reading Series provides students, faculty, and the local community with the opportunity to hear published creative writers read from their works.  Featured writers include nationally and internationally renowned authors, regional writers, and local writers.  There are eleven readings a semester (beginning the second week of the term), held each Friday at noon in the auditorium of the Harold B. Lee Library on campus.  Following the reading, audience members can attend a reception, meet the visiting writer, and purchase books the writer will sign.    

 

The schedule for Winter 2008 semester is as follows: 

 

Jan.   18           Dean Hughes

Jan.   25           Linda Gregerson

Feb.    1           Eric Eliason

Feb.   8            Michael Sowder

Feb.  15           Gail Carson Levine

Feb.  22           Bruce Jorgensen

Feb.  29           Billy Collins

Mar.   7            Todd Petersen

Mar.  14           Paisley Rekdal

Mar.  21           Graduate Students

Mar.  28           Tribute to Leslie Norris

 

 

January 18                                          Dean Hughes

 

Dean Hughes has published books, stories, and poems for readers of all ages.  His more than ninety published books include the popular Children of the Promise series, predecessor to Hearts of the Children.  He holds a bachelor’s degree from Weber State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.  He has attended post-doctoral seminars at Stanford and Yale Universities and taught English at Central Missouri State University.  He currently teaches creative writing classes at Brigham Young University.  His newest book Before the Dawn centers on the struggle of Leah, a depression era widow.  He and his wife, Kathleen Hurst Hughes, have three children and live in Midway, Utah. 

 

January 25                                          Linda Gregerson

 

Linda Gregerson is the author of the poetry collections Magnetic North, Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory.  A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan.  Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry as well as in Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and many other journals.  She has received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, two Pushcart prizes, and the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Award. 

 

February 1                                          Eric Eliason

 

Eric Eliason is the author of two books from the University of Illinois Press: The J. Golden Kimball Stories and Mormons and Mormonism, and a third book, Saba Lace History and Patterns.  He has three additional books forthcoming: one on Great Plains Coyote coursing, a second on hunting and fishing in North America, and a third about Mexican black velvet painting.  A folklore and literature professor in the BYU English Department, he holds a B.A. from Brigham Young University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Texas at Austin.  He is the chaplain for the 1^st Battalion, 19^th Special Forces Unit of the Utah National Guard and has served in Afghanistan (2004) and the Philippines (2006 and 2007).  He lives in Springville with his wife Stephanie and their four children. 

 

February 8                              Michael Sowder 

 

Michael Sowder’s poetry collection, The Empty Boat, was chosen by Diane Wakoski to win the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize.  The collection was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and for Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for the Utah Book Award.  Sowder is also the author of Whitman’s Ecstatic Union:  Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass, published by Routledge in 2005.  Poetry editor of Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Sowder is an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University in Logan. 

 

February 15                            Gail Carson Levine

 

Gail Carson Levine grew up in New York City and has been writing all her life.  Her first book for children, Ella Enchanted, was a 1998 Newbery Honor Book.  She is also the author of three other Princess Tales books: The Fairy’s Mistake, The Princess Test, and Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep.  Today Gail, her husband David, and their Airedale Jake live in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Brewster, New York. 

 

February 22                            Bruce Jorgensen

 

Bruce Jorgensen was born in Salina, Utah.  He graduated from BYU and then attended Cornell University on Woodrow Wilson and Danforth fellowships, receiving both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.  He taught at Ithaca College, Cornell, Syracuse University, and Southern Utah State College before coming to BYU in 1975.  He has published poems, stories, critical essays, and reviews in Carolina Quarterly, Ensign, Modern Fiction Studies, BYU Studies, Sunstone, Dialogue, Western American Literature, Wasatch Review, and High Plains Literary Review.  Winner of the Utah Arts Council award for the short story and the Association for Mormon Letters short story award, he says that his work focuses on the intersection of story, the ethics of agency, and the sacred, and that the main study of his life since childhood has been the hearing and telling of stories.

 

February 29                            Billy Collins

 

Former United States Poet Laureate (2001-2003), Billy Collins is the lightning rod at the center of contemporary American poetry.  He has been responsible for making poetry both accessible and interesting to general readers, which is seen by many poets as hopeful for the future of poetry.  He has published eight collections of his own poetry and two anthologies, as well as serving as the guest editor of Best American Poetry 2006. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been awarded Poetry Foundation’s first Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry ($20,000).  He was the New York State Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. The New York Times has said about him:  “Luring his readers into the poem with humor, Mr. Collins leads them unwittingly into deeper, more serious places, a kind of journey from the familiar to the quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes tender, often profound.”

 

March   7                                Todd Petersen

 

Todd Petersen began his college career as a film major at the University of Oregon, then later earned graduate degrees in creative writing at Northern Arizona University (M.A.) and Oklahoma State University (Ph.D.).  His stories have appeared in Hobart, Dialogue, Weber Studies, Wisconsin Review, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, Third Coast and other journals.  He has won awards for his fiction from the Associated Writing Programs, Utah Arts Council, Sunstone Foundation, and Salt Lake City Weekly.  He has recently completed a novel entitled Twilight of the Gods and is working on a collection of six interlocking stories called Small World.  He teaches at Southern Utah University and lived in Cedar City with his wife Alisa, daughter Zoe, and son Ike. 

 

March  14                               Paisley Rekdal

 

Paisley Rekdal was born and raised in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and three books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope.  Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA fellowship, the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright fellowship, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review.  Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Nerve, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Review, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals.  She teaches at the University of Utah. 

 

March  21                               Graduate Students

 

A competition will select three advanced writing students from BYU to read their creative work. 

 

March  28                               Tribute to Leslie Norris

 

Leslie Norris was an internationally-renowned Welsh poet and short story writer who taught at Brigham Young University from the early 1980s until his death in 2006, holding the University Professorship in Creative Writing and receiving the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lectureship.  His poems regularly appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly.  His five collections of poetry, Tongue of Beauty, Poems, The Loud Winter, Ransoms, and Collected Poems, and his story collections Sliding, The Girl from Cardigan, and Collected Stories won such awards as the Cholmondeley Poetry Prize, the David Higham Memorial Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award, the AML award for poetry, and the Welsh Arts Council Senior Fiction Award.  He wrote two books of children’s poems and translated Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.  The only writer to have been elected a fellow of both the Welsh Academy and England’s Royal Academy of Literature, he is considered one of the most important Welsh writers of the post-war period.  Shortly after his death in 2006 this tribute was produced by Jay Fox and Sirpa Grierson.  It includes Leslie Norris reading his own work, as well as tributes from colleagues and associates.