Updated September 3, 2009

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Writers' Series is an annual offering of the UAB Department of English Program in Creative Writing. For more information, call 205-934-4250.

Sept. 23

The UAB Writers' Series presents the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson at 4 p.m. in the UAB Mary Culp Hulsey Recital Hall, 950 13th St. South. The event is free and open to the public. Call 205-934-4250 for more details. Emerson, who will present a lecture and reading, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife, which is an exploration of divorce, remarriage and death. She is a professor of English and an Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. She also is a contributing editor of the literary magazine Shenandoah.

Oct. 7

The UAB Writers' Series and the Birmingham Area Consortium for Higher Education (BACHE) presents poet Lorna Dee Cervantes at 4 p.m. at the UAB Spencer Honors House, 1190 10th Ave. South. The event is free and open to the public. Call 205-934-4250 for more details. Cervantes' work is known for evoking the cultural clash that Americans of Mexican descent often face. She is the author of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, published in 1991, and her debut poetry collection, Emplumada, published in 1981, won an American Book Award. Cervantes is co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal. In addition, her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties. In 1995, she received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

Oct. 21

The UAB Writers' Series presents children's book author Kerry Madden at 4 p.m. in the UAB Mary Culp Hulsey Recital Hall, 950 13th St. South. The event is free and open to the public. For more details, call 205-934-4250. Madden is author of the Maggie Valley Trilogy, published by Viking Children's Books. The trilogy includes Gentle's Holler (2005), Louisiana's Song (2007) and Jessie's Mountain (2008), set in the heart of Appalachia in the Smoky Mountains. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age in 1997. Her book Writing Smarts, published by American Girl, is full of story sparks for young writers. Her latest book, Harper Lee: Up Close, published by Viking, made Booklist's Ten Top Biographies of 2009 for Youth. Madden will teach creative writing at UAB this fall.

About the UAB Department of English

The UAB Department of English offers an undergraduate degree in English with concentrations in creative writing, linguistics or professional writing and public discourse, and graduate degrees in literature, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing.