Modern Masters Reading Series

The Modern Masters Reading Series, sponsored by the writing department and with support from the Center for the Humanities, brings nationally and internationally known writers to Loyola's campus.

Through visiting writers who represent diverse backgrounds and a variety of genres, our student-writers learn to see literature as a living art produced by actual people whose anecdotes and asides offer illuminating insights into their vision and approach to craft. From small-group workshops to class visits to open question-and-answer sessions, Loyola’s writing students have the rare opportunity to speak directly to successful authors.

In recent years, the most gratifying responses to our guests—contemporary writers of distinguished achievement—have come from Loyola students: apprentice writers who, in many cases, have never before attended a reading, have never been part of a "great audience," and do not know what to expect from such an event.

We’re always open to suggestions for future readers from the entire Loyola community. Please feel free to contact the Modern Masters committee (Ned Balbo, Lia Purpura, and Ron Tanner) with any questions or ideas for next year's series.

2009-2010 Schedule
All readings at 5pm in the Andrew White Student Center Fourth Floor Program Room, except as indicated.

Daniel Tobin, Monday, September 21, 2009
Location:  McGuire Hall West, Andrew White Student Center
Daniel Tobin is the author of four books of poems--Where the World Is Made (1999), Double Life (2004), The Narrows (2005), and Second Things (2008)—and the critical study Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999). Among Tobin’s awards are The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and an NEA fellowship. His poems appear widely in The Nation, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, and many more. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2007) and, with Pimone Triplett, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art (2007). He is Chair of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston.
 
Paul Lisicky, Tuesday, October 20, 2009 
Location:  McManus Theatre
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy (1999) and Famous Builder (2002). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Five Points, Subtropics, Short Takes, Flash Fiction, Truth in Nonfiction, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City, and has taught at Cornell University, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, Rutgers-Newark, Fairfield University, Antioch University-Los Angeles, and The Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A new novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming.
 
Robin Hemley, Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Fiction Writer, Poet, and Essayist, Robin Hemley is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his memoir DO-OVER! (“in which a 48-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom and other embarrassments”). He has published seven books, including Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday and Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art and Madness, and his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies. Robin Hemley directs the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa.

Mary Jo Salter, Thursday, February 4, 2010
Mary Jo Salter’s latest collection is A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (2008); previous books include Henry Purcell in Japan (1985); Unfinished Painting, the 1989 Lamont Award winner for a distinguished second volume; Sunday Skaters, a 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award nominee; and Open Shutters, a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. Salter is also a children's author (The Moon Comes Home, 1989), playwright (Falling Bodies, 2004), and lyricist whose songs from the cycle Rooms of Light, set to music by Fred Hersch, premiered at The Allen Room, Lincoln Center in 2007. Salter grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Detroit, and Baltimore, and was educated at Harvard and Cambridge. Her essays and reviews appear in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. The recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, Salter is a Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.

Linda Bierds, Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Linda Bierds is the author of numerous books of poetry including First Hand (Putnam, 2005), The Seconds (2001), The Profile Makers (1997) and The Ghost Trio (1994), which was named a Notable Book Selection by the American Library Association. Bierds has received several Pushcart Prizes, as well as grants and awards from the Seattle Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the MacArthur Foundation, who praised her in 1998 as "a poet whose attention to historical detail and to narratives of lyric description sets her apart from the prevailing contemporary styles." She has taught English and Writing at the University of Washington since 1989, and lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington.

Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Born in Belencito, Colombia in 1961, Maurice Kilwein Guevara grew up in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with degrees in English and Psychology in 1983, and received an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 1986. Since then, he has published four collections of poetry, two of which, Postmortem (1994) and Autobiography of So-and-S Poems in Prose (2001), trace his early experiences en route from Colombia to Pennsylvania. The third, Poems of the River Spirit (1996), explores similarities between the two countries and cultures that so powerfully influenced his life. In his latest collection, Poema (2008), Guevara rethinks the interconnectedness of form, context, and meaning in a poem. Guevara is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he teaches graduate-level courses in creative writing and Latino studies. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines.