2006-2007 Reading Series
Please scroll down for spring ’07 info.
Fall 2006
The From the Fishouse reading series is generously supported by Bowdoin College, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Davis Family Foundation.
Tyehimba Jess: Thursday, September 7, 2006
7:30 p.m., Bowdoin College, Donald B. MacMillan House, 5 McKeen Street, Brunswick, Maine
Tyehimba Jess’s first book of poetry, leadbelly (Verse Press, 2005), is a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. He won the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000 – 2001, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award. He was on the 2000 and 2001 Chicago Green Mill Slam teams, received a 2005 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-05 Winter Writing Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A proud Cave Canem alumnus, and is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jess’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (Penguin Books, 1996), Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (Manic D Press, 2000), Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press, 2001), Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century (Black Classic Press, 2002), Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (Third World Press, 2002), and Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones (Aspect Press, 2004). His first non-fiction book, African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions, and Legacy (Citadel Press), was published in December 2003.
Sarah Messer: Thursday, October 5, 2006
7:30 p.m., Bowdoin College, Roger Howell, Jr. House, 228 Maine Street, Brunswick, Maine
Author of Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England’s Oldest Continuously Lived-In House (Viking, 2004) and the poetry collection Bandit Letters (New Issues, 2001), Sarah Messer has received fellowships and grants from organizations including the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and Quarterly West, as well as several anthologies. A graduate of Middlebury College and the MFA program at the University of Michigan, she lives in North Carolina, where she is associate professor of creative writing at The University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is currently working on two new books of poetry and a novel.
Kazim Ali: Thursday, October 19, 2006
7:30 p.m., Bowdoin College, Samuel A. Ladd, Jr. House, 14 College Street, Brunswick, Maine
Kazim Ali’s first book of poetry The Far Mosque was published by Alice James Books in October 2005. He is also the author a novel Quinn’s Passage. His poems and essays have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Catamaran, and in the anthologies Writing the Lines of Our Hands and Risen From the East. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, he is the publisher of Nightboat Books and assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Shippensburg University.
Kevin A. González: Thursday, November 16, 2006
7:30 p.m., Bowdoin College, George H. Quinby House, 250 Maine Street, Brunswick, Maine
Kevin A. González was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a Martha Meier Renk Poetry Fellow. His poems have appeared in Poetry, McSweeney’s, Callaloo and The Progressive; and his stories have appeared in Playboy, Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and Best New American Voices. Currently, he is a graduate fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Tracy K. Smith: Thursday, December 7, 2006
7:30 p.m., Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Avenue.
Part of a Colby/Bates/Bowdoin faculty project to examine and foster poetry’s role in community-building.
Tracy K. Smith is the author of The Body’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2003), winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Callaloo, The Nebraska Review, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Poetry Daily, Poetry 30, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award and a 2005 Whiting Writer’s Prize, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
Spring 2007
Ross Gay:
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Wednesday, February 7, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
Colby College, Waterville, Maine, Robinson Room, Miller Library
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Thursday, February 8, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, Lancaster Lounge, Moulton Union
Ross Gay is the author of the Against Which (CavanKerry, Fall 2006). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Harvard Review, Columbia: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, among other places. He teaches poetry at Montclair State University and in the low-residency program at New England College.
Sherwin Bitsui:
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Wednesday, March 7, 2007, 12:00 noon
Portland Public Library, Portland, Maine
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Thursday, March 8, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
Colby College, Waterville, Maine, Robinson Room, Miller Library
Part of a Colby/Bates/Bowdoin faculty project to examine and foster poetry’s role in community-building.
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Navajo of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is the recipient of the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and more recently, the 2002 University of Arizona Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Award. Sherwin has published his poems in American Poets, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Red Ink, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Shapeshift (The University of Arizona Press, 2003) is his first book.
V. Penelope Pelizzon & Patrick Rosal:
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Wednesday, April 18, 2007, 12:00 noon
Portland Public Library, Portland, Maine
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Thursday, April 19, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, Donald B. MacMillan House, 5 McKeen Street
Part of a Colby/Bates/Bowdoin faculty project to examine and foster poetry’s role in community-building.
V. Penelope Pelizzon’s first poetry collection, Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000) won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Norma Farber First Book Award. Other honors include a Discovery/The Nation Award, The Kenneth Rexroth Translation Award (for Umberto Saba’s poems from Italian), and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. Her new poems and essays have appeared recently in Poetry, The Hudson Review, 32 Poems, The Kenyon Review, Field, the New England Review, and Fourth Genre. Pelizzon earned a B.A. at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, an MFA at the University of California–Irvine, and a Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri. She is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at the University of Connecticut, where she often bases poetry workshops around mythology, science, or translation. Since 2005, she has spent part of each year abroad with her husband, fellow poet Anthony Deaton, who is posted as vice consul to Naples. She is currently writing a book about crime films of the 1930s and ’40s.
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books2003), which won the Asian-American Writers’ Workshop Member’s Choice Award, and recently My American Kundiman (Persea Books, 2006). His chapbook, Uncommon Denominators, won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina. Rosal’s work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies and he has been a featured reader at many venues around the country, in Buenos Aires, London, and on the BBC radio program “The World Today.” His collaborations include work with composer Robert Paterson, visual artist/film director Jorge Caterbetti, painter Kim Krause, and Allied Motion, a dance company in residence at Penn State Altoona, where Rosal was 2001 Emerging Writer in Residence. In addition to serving as 2007 visiting writer in residence at Centre College, he has taught on the faculty of Bloomfield College and the MFA program at Goddard College, as well as Kundiman’s Summer Writing Retreat for Asian American Poets. He has conducted workshops at Sarah Lawrence College, in Alabama prisons through Auburn University, and in New Jersey public schools as a poet with the Geraldine R. Doge Foundation.