The UAB Writers' Series is an annual offering of the Program in Creative Writing. Readings are free, open to the public, and co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Honors Program, BACHE
Visiting Writers, UAB Student Government Association, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and Friends of the Writing Program.
All readings start at 7:00 p.m. at UAB's Spencer Honors House (right), 1190 10th Ave. South. Free parking is available in lot 16E (in front of the building)—see a map.
Daniel Anderson, September 12
Daniel Anderson’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Best American Poetry, and Southwest Review among other places. His books of poetry include Drunk in Sunlight (Johns Hopkins University Press) and January Rain (Story Line Press). He edited The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov, which was listed as a New York Times “Notable Book” in 2003. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bogliasco Foundation, and has held teaching appointments at Kenyon College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and Murray State University. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Read work by Anderson
Photo credit: Miriam Berkley
Charles D'Ambrosio, October 3
Charles D'Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories; Orphans, a collection of essays; and The Dead Fish Museum. His fiction and essays appear primarily in the New Yorker, and his stories have been selected for The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize, and the Pushcart Anthology. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA, a Whiting Award, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book, The Dead Fish Museum, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Faculty Poetry Reading, October 24
Featuring faculty from the UAB English Department.
Kevin Young, November 7
Kevin Young is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. His collections include Black Maria: Poems Produced and Directed by Kevin Young; Most Way Home (winner of the 1993 National Poetry Series); To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor; Jelly Roll: A Blues; and most recently For the Confederate Dead. Young's poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Callaloo. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship.
Richard Hague, January 16
Richard Hague has published eleven volumes of poetry, including Alive in Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press), named 2004 Poetry Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association; Ripening (Ohio State University Press) for which he was named Poet of the Year in Ohio in 1985; Possible Debris (Cleveland State University Poetry Center); and Lives of the Poem: Community & Connection in a Writing Life (Wind Publications, 2005.). His Milltown Natural: Essays & Stories From A Life in Ohio was a 1998 National Book Award nominee in Creative Nonfiction. He has volunteered for a quarter of a century in the Community Gardens program of the Civic Garden Center in Cincinnati. He teaches at Northeastern University in Boston in the summers.
Carolyn Elkins & Patricia Waters, February 20
Carolyn Elkins has published poems in journals in the United States and abroad, including Asheville Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Chattahoochee Review, Gargoyle, Psychopoetica, Red Rock Review, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and American Studies in Denmark. She is the author of three books of poetry: Angel Pays a Visit (The Emrys Chapbook Series, 2006); Daedalus Rising (Emrys Press, 2002); and Coriolis Forces, which won the Palanquin Press Chapbook Contest in 2000. All three books have been nominated for Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters awards. Her poem "High Lonesome" won First Place in Red Rock Review’s 2001 poetry contest, and three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Elkins is the associate editor of Tar River Poetry and currently lives in Cullowhee, North Carolina.
Patricia Waters was born and reared in Nashville, Tennessee. After completing a B.A. in English and history at the University of Memphis, she worked in England and Norway on archaeological digs for three seasons, then took her M.A. in English at UTK. Working as a journalist, community activist, and teacher in Memphis and New Orleans, she began writing poetry. Returning to rural east Tennessee to rear her family, she taught at Tennessee Wesleyan College and attended writers’ conferences in lieu of an M.F.A. She completed the Ph.D. at UTK, and as writer in residence at the UTK libraries gathered some twelve years of work into manuscript form. She is now an instructor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and her first book, The Ordinary Sublime (Anhinga Press), was published fall, 2006.
Robin Hemley, March 19
Robin Hemley has published stories and essays in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Review, Conjunctions, and Shenandoah. His work has won numerous awards, including The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from the Chicago Tribune, the George Garrett Award for Fiction, and two Pushcart Prizes. His Turning Life into Fiction is a widely-used craft text, and his most recent book, Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, Nebraska 2006), was named an Editor’s Choice Book of 2003 by the American Library Association. He has co-authored an anthology of nontraditional stories, Extreme Fiction: Formalists and Fabulists (Longman, 2004). He is Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and writes a bi-monthly column for The Believer Magazine on defunct literary journals.
Poe Ballantine, April 2
Poe Ballantine is the author of two essay collections, Things I Like About America and 501 Minutes to Christ, and two novels, God Clobbers Us All and Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, winner of the 2007 Bronze ForeWord's Book of the Year Award for Literary Fiction. His work has previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly Online, The Sun, Kenyon Review, and The Coal City Review. In addition to garnering numerous Pushcart and O’Henry nominations, Ballantine's work has been included in the 1998 Best American Short Story and 2006 Best American Essay anthologies.
Student Reading, April 16
featuring students from the UAB creative writing workshops selected by UAB creative writing faculty