Readings
2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Visiting Writers Schedule:
“Mississippi Zoom Room” – Fridays at 7PM
Fall 2020:
Friday, Sept 4: Eduardo C. Corral (poet) discussing his new book from Graywolf, “Guillotine”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/eduardo-c-corral
Eduardo C. Corral earned degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut collection of poetry, Slow Lightning (2012), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, making him the first Latino recipient of the award. His second collection is Guillotine (2020). Praised for his seamless blending of English and Spanish, tender treatment of history, and careful exploration of sexuality, Corral has received numerous honors and awards, including the Discovery/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Monday, Sept 14 (time TBA): Tayari Jones (novelist)
New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author of four novels,most recently An American Marriage. Published in 2018, An American Marriageis an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries.
Jones, a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.
Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Friday, Sept 18: Molly McCully Brown (poet/CNF), **A recent UM MFA alum**, discussing essay book “Places I’ve Taken My Body”
https://www.mollymccullybrown.com
Molly Mcully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books) which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017, and the forthcoming essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body.
Oct. 9: Literary Agents Jeff Kleinman and Sonali Chanchani
Folio Literary Agency
https://www.foliolit.com
They will give a zoom on “what agents want” and then give quick individual zoom consultations with MFA students the next day.
Oct. 30 : Paisley Rekdal (poet/CNF)
https://www.paisleyrekdal.com
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her newest work of nonfiction is a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. A new collection of poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, was published spring 2019. Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021. She is the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020.
Friday, November 6: Kaitlyn Greenidge (novelist)
https://www.kaitlyngreenidge.com
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle.com, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places.
Friday, November 13: Michael Farris Smith (novelist)
https://www.michaelfarrissmith.com
Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and numerous others, and have been named Indie Next List, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has been a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, the Gold Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix des Lectrices in France, and his essays have appeared with The New York Times, Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, and more. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.
Spring 2021 (assuming we will be back on campus, back to normal):
February 24-25: Carolyn Forche
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carolyn-forche
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review, Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov.
AWP March 3-6
Spring Break March 13-21
March 29th : Oscar Casares
https://www.oscarcasares.com
“I write novels, stories, and essays about the border. My first book was a story collection called Brownsville, which was named a Notable Book of 2004 by the American Library Association and today is used in courses at several universities. Amigoland, my first novel, was selected for the 2009 Austin Mayor’s Book Club, a citywide reading initiative by Austin Public Library.”
April: Glitterary Festival
Headliner TBA
We also bring in agents and editors to conference with our students. Thank you to Dan Conaway of The Writer’s House in NYC, pictured here being interviewed by one of his writers, Megan Abbot, about how writers and agents work together. Previous years we welcomed Lisa Gallagher of Sanford J. Greenburg and Stella Connell of the Stella Connell Agency.