Speakers & Schedule
Friday
3:30p Optional Workshops or Time to Write
Joe Ahearn: “Revision Strategies”
Kazim Ali: “Poetry as Sound in Space”
Laurie Ann Guerrero, “Borrowing Bones: A Generative Workshop”
5p Panel: On Publishing
Kazim Ali, Nick Courtright, Ryan Sharp, Cindy Huyser
6p Dinner or off-campus dining
8p Featured Readings: Lorna Dee Cervantes and Tony Hoagland
9:30p Kafe Kaffeine Sessions: Readings by the Round Top Scholars, Open Mic to follow immediately
Saturday
9a Featured Readings: Nick Courtright and Laurie Ann Guerrero
10a Panel: Border/lines
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Kazim Ali
10:30a The Voices of Haiti: Images, Music, Poetry Kwame Dawes
11a Optional Workshops or Time to Write
1. Dorothy Barnett and Pattiann Rogers, “Walking and Writing in the Poetry Garden”
2. Brian Turner, “The Poetry of Negation”
3. Nick Courtright, “The Unmoved Mover: Poetry as the Search for Truth”
12:30p Lunch or off-campus dining , Visit BookWoman and browse our silent auction
2:00p On Craft – Tony Hoagland
3p Featured Reading: Kazim Ali and Linda Gregg
4p Panel: Peace Talks
Brian Turner, Joe Ahearn, Naomi Shihab Nye, Kwame Dawes
5p Open Mic or Time to Write
6p Dinner or off-campus dining
8p Featured Readings: Kwame Dawes and Brian Turner
Robert Skiles, musical guest
Reception to follow immediately
Sunday
9a Distance Avails Not!
Remembrance and Celebration:
Linda Gregg on Jack Gilbert
10a Featured Reading: Joe Ahearn and Pattiann Rogers
11a Optional Workshops or Time to Write
1. Lorna Dee Cervantes: “Ecopoetics: A Writer’s Way of Knowledge”
2. Tony Hoagland: “Information and Layering: The Composite Poem”
12:30p Garden Party Poetry Picnic & Festival Anthology Reading
Joe Ahearn is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Five Fictions (Sulphur River Review Press) and three chapbooks, synthetic (Firewheel Editions), Five Fictions (Mudlark Chapbook Series), and Kyoko At Play (Harvest Publications). His poetry, fiction, translations and essays have been widely published, both in this country and abroad. He earned his M.F.A. at the University of Texas, where he was a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers and served on the editorial board for Bat City Review. Ahearn co-edited the anthology, Best Texas Writing, and currently serves on the editorial board of DMQ Review. He teaches writing courses in the M.F.A. program at Western Connecticut State University and works in the Early College Start program at Austin Community College.
Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and translator. His books include several volumes of poetry, including The Far Mosque (Alice James Books), winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008), and the cross-genre text Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). He has also published a translation of Water’s Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri (Omnidawn Press, 2011). His novels include Quinn’s Passage (blazeVox books), named one of “The Best Books of 2005″ by Chronogram magazine and The Disappearance of Seth (Etruscan Press, 2009), and his books of essays include Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence (University of Michigan Press, 2010), Fasting for Ramadan (Tupelo Press, 2011), and Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). In addition to co-editing Jean Valentine: This-World Company (University of Michigan Press, 2012), he is a contributing editor for AWP Writers Chronicle and associate editor of the literary magazine FIELD and founding editor of the small press Nightboat Books. He is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College and teaches in the Masters of Fine Arts program of the University of Southern Maine.
One of the major voices in Chicana literature, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes’s writing evokes and explores cultural difference—between Mexican, Anglo, Native American, and African American lives—as well as the divides of gender and economics. Born in San Francisco in 1954 to Mexican and Native American ancestry, Cervantes won the American Book Award in 1982 for her debut collection Emplumada. In 2006 Cervantes published Drive: The First Quartet. A selection of new poems arranged as five books and spanning two decades,a collection Martin Espada called “a landmark work.” Cervantes has been much anthologized, and has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the Paterson Prize for Poetry and a Latino Literature Award. She is director of the creative writing program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Nick Courtright is the author of Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist published in 2012 by Gold Wake Press, and Let There Be Light, which is forthcoming in early 2014. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Boston Review, and Kenyon Review Online, among numerous others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He’s Interviews Editor of the Austinist, an arts and culture website based in Austin, Texas, where he teaches English, Humanities, and Philosophy, and lives with his wife, Michelle, and son, William. Feel free to find him at nickcourtright.com <http://nickcourtright.com> .
Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. He is the author of 16 collections of poetry; his latest, Duppy Conqueror was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. He has published two novels, and an autobiography, A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative. An actor, playwright, and producer, he has seen 15 of his plays produced. In 2009, Dawes won an Emmy for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive site based on his Pulitzer Center project, HOPE: Living and loving with AIDS in Jamaica. He is the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica each year.
Linda Gregg has received such honors as the 2009 Jackson Poetry Prize, a 2006 PEN/Voelker Award, fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim, a Whiting Writers Award, a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship and numerous Pushcart Prizes. She has published eight books of poetry, including In the Middle Distance, Things and Flesh, Chosen by the Lion, The Sacrament of Desire, Alma and Too Bright to See, all from Graywolf Press.
Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in South San Antonio, Texas. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Women Studies Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, Huizache, Feminist Studies, Boxcar Poetry Review, Acentos, Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review among others. Guerrero holds a BA in English Language & Literature from Smith College and an MFA in poetry from Drew University. Winner of the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, her collection of poems, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, is forthcoming from The University of Notre Dame Press. A new co-editor for the Texas Poetry Calendar, she teaches for the online MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of the Incarnate Word, and at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas.
Tony Hoagland’s books of poems include What Narcissism Means to Me, and Donkey Gospel. His awards include the Jackson Prize, the O.B. Hardisson Prize, and The James Laughlin Award. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, and at Warren Wilson College. Recently he has founded Five Powers Poetry.com, a program for coaching high school teachers in the teaching of poetry in the classroom. In 2006 he published a book of nonfiction, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft. Hoagland currently teaches at the University of Houston.
Naomi Shihab Nye feels lucky to have been a visiting poet based in San Antonio for 38 years. She is the author and/or editor of 33 books, which include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, a finalist for the National Book Award and her collection A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, an ALA Notable Book. Most recent books are: There Is No Long Distance Now, a collection of very short stories, and Transfer (poems).
Pattiann Rogers has published thirteen books, most recently The Grand Array, Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit (Trinity University Press, 2010) and Wayfare (Penguin, 2008). Her next book, Holy Heathen Rhapsody, will be out from Penguin in October, 2013. Rogers is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literary Fellowship and a Literary Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation. Her poems have received five Pushcart Prizes, two appearances in Best American Poetry, five appearances in Best Spiritual Writing. She has taught as a visiting writer at several universities, including Arkansas, Montana, Texas, Washington University and Pacific University. She is the mother of two sons and has three grandsons. She lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.
Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Poetry Daily, VQR, The Georgia Review, and other journals. He is a co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders (McSweeney’s, April 2012) and his memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, will be available in 2014. He received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others. He is the Director of the low-residency MFA at Sierra Nevada College.
