Readers & Writers, LSU's premiere contemporary reading series, announces our 2014-15 lineup!
All events take place at the Baton Rouge Gallery.
1515 Dalrymple Drive, Baton Rouge, LA 70808; 225.383.1470
UPCOMING EVENTS
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 7PM
Carolyn Hembree’s poetry collection, Skinny, was published by Kore Press in 2012. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and other journals and anthologies. Nous-zot Press will publish her chapbook, Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls, in February. Carolyn grew up in Tennessee and Alabama. Before completing her MFA, she found employment as a cashier, housecleaner, cosmetics consultant, telecommunicator, actor, receptionist, paralegal, coder, and freelance writer. She is an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
Heidi Lynn Staples' debut collection, Guess Can Gallop, was selected by Brenda Hillman as a winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is author of three other collections, including Dog Girl (Ahsahta, 2007) and Noise Event (Ahsahta, 2013), and her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Ploughshares, Women's Studies Quarterly and elsewhere. Staples was raised in the Southeastern temperate forests of North America, both on and off the Gulf Coastal Plain, and she is an editor and founder of Poets for Living Waters, begun as an international response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 7PM
Cristina Henríquez is the author of the novels The Book of Unknown Americans and The World in Half, and of the short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, American Scholar, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, AGNI, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, where she was named one of “Fiction's New Luminaries.” Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, the Oxford American, and elsewhere. She is also the recipient of an Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. Henríquez teaches in the graduate program at Northwestern University and lives in Illinois. Photo credit: Michael Lionstar
EARLIER THIS SEASON
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 7PM
Interdisciplinary poet and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in Harlem. She is the author of the poetry collection TwERK (2013) and several chapbooks, as well as the album Television (2003). Diggs’s interdisciplinary work has been featured in exhibits at several New York museums, including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Her additional honors include scholarships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Harlem Community Arts Fund, Black Earth Institute, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation. She lives in New York City.
Ms. Diggs' reading features the spoken word artists Wordplay.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 4PM
1985-2015:
30th Anniversary Celebration of the MFA in Creative Writing, featuring:
Lara Glenum is the author of five books of poetry: The Hounds of No, Maximum Gaga, Pop Corpse, All Hopped Up On Fleshy Dumdums, and the forthcoming JUNK SHOT. She is also the co-editor of Gurlesque, an anthology of contemporary women’s poetry and visual art. She is a professor in the MFA Program at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA.
New Orleans resident, pit-bull advocate and award winning independent filmmaker, Mari Kornhauser, has made three independent features, all having box office stars and released foreign and domestically. She has written numerous assignments for producers, directors, actors, and studios. Like everyone touched by Hurricane Katrina, her life was transformed, so she started her first non-fiction videography, FINDING HOME AGAIN. A ten-minute excerpt played in the “Shooting Katrina” program of the 2006 New Orleans Film Festival and her footage has been licensed for usage in other documentaries. She has produced a reality tv pilot with for A & E network and as well as writing for the Peabody award winning HBO’s TREME, created by Eric Overmyer and David Simon. One of her episodes, “Slip Away”, was a Pen finalist in the teleplay category. Currently, she is in development on a tv pilot and micro-budget feature. She continues to teach screenwriting in the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at Louisiana State University but is debating joining the Air Force so she can become a hurricane hunter.
Keija Parssinen is the author of two novels, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis and The Ruins of Us, which received a Michener-Copernicus award and was long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize. A graduate of Princeton University, she received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her work has appeared in Better Than Fiction, the Lonely Planet's anthology of travel essays by fiction writers, Marie Claire, FiveChapters.com, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Saudi Arabia, she now lives in Columbia, Missouri with her husband and son.
Born in Hammond, Louisiana, James Wilcox worked at Random House and Doubleday in New York after graduating from Yale, where he studied with Robert Penn Warren. Wilcox’s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Avenue. In 1986 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Wilcox’s nine novels include Modern Baptists, Heavenly Days, and Hunk City. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Elle. Wilcox was a judge for the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for fiction in 1991; for the 1994 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award; and for the Eudora Welty Prize for Fiction in 2005. He received an ATLAS in 2007-08, and in 2011 was given the Louisiana Writer Award. Currently, he is on the creative writing faculty at LSU.
ABOUT US
As the home of Louisiana's flagship university and the capital of a state teeming with cultural diversity and a rich artistic heritage, we feel Baton Rouge holds great potential to serve as this state’s creative nucleus--a place where artists from all over the world can come to share their work through conversation with an engaged and diverse audience. As the premiere contemporary literary reading series at LSU, Readers & Writers has been instrumental in helping Baton Rouge realize this potential.
Since its formation by the LSU English Department in 1993, Readers & Writers has featured hundreds of internationally renowned and award-winning novelists, poets, playwrights, and performers and created events that have provided thoughtful, moving, funny, and always rewarding interactions with citizens and students from all walks of life.
