University of Mississippi

Readings

UM MFA students are provided opportunities to get involved with visiting writers beyond simply sitting in the audience.  Lunches, interviews, individual conferences–all these are part of our students’ experiences.  When poet Anne Carson visited with her partner, Robert Currie, MFAs were involved in their dance/poetry hybrid performance.
Photos provided by Gaetano Catelli.

COMING IN Spring 2013

Acclaimed Fiction writer Denis Johnson, originally scheduled for Tues February 5, has had to postpone due to a back injury.  Please check back for his new date (most likely March or April).

Historian and biographer Ron Chernow reads at 7:30 at Nutt Auditorium.

Richard Ford Master Class Announced.  Richard Ford will provide two special classes for MFA students; Wed. April 10 from 4-6 and Thursday Apr. 11 from 10-12.  This second class will be followed by the dedication of the new Ford-Hannah Room for Writers!  1:15 to 2 pm there will be a reception.
The Oxford Conference for the Book will include readings by Brad Watson, Owen King, Nicole Cooley, Michael Knight, Skip Horvack, and Alice Randall–and a panel on The Ecopoetry Anthology co-edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, who will be on the panel with contributors Forrest Gander and Juan Carlos Galeano.

Friday, Mar, 22nd at noon: Nicole Cooley’s proposed Books N Lunch talk at the Oxford/Layfayette Public Library on Bramlett: Tiny Texts: Flash fiction, short poems, one minute plays.  This talk will focus on miniatures, tiny texts that play with language in wonderful, fun ways and at the same time ask us to rethink our ideas about reading and writing. We will look at short forms in early twentieth-first American writing, from – haiku to prose poems to micro-fiction to tiny diaries written on index cards. We will discuss silence, omission, erasure, page space, and look closely at the linguistic strategies employed by texts that define themselves as “shorts.”

The Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference will be May 2-5, and guests include Lee Gutkind, Dinty Moore, Julia Rhodes, Kristen Iversen, and others.

The Faulkner Conference in July will include a panel of African American poets responsing to Faulkner and will result in a chapbook edited by Derrick Harriel and Chiyuma Elliot.

COMING IN 2013-2014: poet Patricia Smith, fiction writer Tobias Wolff, CNF writer, Ander Monson, Larraine Newman (from SNL) and others!

The Visiting Writers Series, made possible by the generosity of the Grisham fund, allows us to bring in some of the most accomplished writers working today. Our featured writers in past years have included:

We also bring in agents and editors to conference with our students.  Thank you to Lisa Gallagher of Sanford J. Greenburg and Stella Connell of the Stella Connell Agency who spoke and met with students this year.  Next year, Amy Williams will conference with students–date TBA.