Writing Department Home

JUDITH HALL
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
5 p.m. in the 4th Floor Program Room
Judith Hall is the author of To Put The Mouth To (William Morrow, 1992), a National Poetry Series selection; Anatomy, Errata (1998), winner of the Ohio State University Press Award in Poetry; The Promised Folly (Northwestern UP, 2003); and Three Trios, her translation of the imaginary poet J II (Northwestern UP, 2007). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere, as well as in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Maryland State Arts Council. She has served as Antioch Review’s poetry editor since 1995 and teaches at the California Institute of Technology and in New England College’s MFA in Poetry Program.

CHARLES MARTIN
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
5 p.m. in the 4th Floor Program Room
Charles Martin's most recent book of poems, Starting From Sleep: New and Selected Poems (Overlook Press, 2002), was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Boulevard, and The Pushcart Prize anthology, among many others. Martin’s verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (W. W. Norton, 2003) received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets; he has also translated the complete poems of Catullus (Johns Hopkins, 1990). Martin has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and Poetry magazine. In 2006, he was appointed Cathedral Poet-in-Residence at The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. He lives in Manhattan and Syracuse, New York.

ANN PANCAKE
Thursday, April 24, 2008
5 p.m. in the 4th Floor Program Room
ANN PANCAKE's collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the 2000 Bakeless award. Other awards and prizes include a Whiting Award, an NEA Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize, and Creative Writing Fellowships from the states of Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and New Stories from the South. Her novel about mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia, Strange As This Weather Has Been, will be published by Shoemaker & Hoard in October 2007. Ann Pancake is a native of West Virginia and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.

ANDREA HOLLANDER BUDY
Thursday, September 27, 2007
5 p.m. in McGuire Hall East
Andrea Hollander Budy is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Woman in the Painting (Autumn House Press, 2006). Her first, House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Other honors include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, two National Endowment for the Arts and Arkansas Arts Council fellowships. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, Kenyon Review, DoubleTake, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Creative Nonfiction. She lives in the Ozark Mountains where she and her husband ran a bed-and-breakfast inn for fifteen years. Since 1991 Budy has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

TRACY KIDDER
Monday, October 22, 2007
5 p.m. in the 4th Floor Program Room
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Tracy Kidder has published essays regularly in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. His bestselling books include House (1985), Old Friends (1993), Home Town (1999) and Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003)--which was chosen by Loyola College as its common text in 2007. Among Schoolchildren (1989), a narrative of one year in the life of a fifth-grade class and its teacher, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1989. Kidder's latest book, My Detachment (2005), is a memoir of his tour of duty in Viet Nam.

STEPHEN KUUSISTO
Thursday, November 8, 2007
5 p.m. in the 4th Floor Program Room
Stephen Kuusisto is the author of Planet of the Blind: A Memoir, a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" for 1998, and Only Bread, Only Light, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. His new memoir, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening was published by W.W. Norton in 2006. He is a frequent commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. His essays and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, including Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and Partisan Review. He has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline, the BBC, Voice of America, Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio and elsewhere. He holds a dual appointment at the University of Iowa where he is Professor of English and Poet in Residence in the College of Medicine.

As Walt Whitman noted, "To have great poets there must be great audiences, too." While part of the College’s mission is to create a charged and receptive intellectual community, we in the newly-formed Writing Department work to offer the community access to great writers and to create broader, more impassioned audiences for contemporary writers.

In recent years, we have found that some of the most gratifying responses to the reading series, though, have come from our students—apprentice writers who 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. Our visitors report their delight in having been included in our Series; they have felt welcomed and gratified by large, receptive audiences comprised of lively, questioning student-writers.

Thanks to our engaging visitors, 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 talk one-on-one with prize-winning contemporary writers—both established and emerging.

There is one new aspect to our reading series this year. Loyola's new President, Father Brian Linnane, S.J., has announced the "Year of the City," a "year-long celebration of the wide diversity of life in the City of Baltimore and an exploration of the issues facing this historic American metropolis." To this end, many courses, departments, and lectures at Loyola will tie in to this theme. Our readers will participate in this important initiative by reading work that touches somehow on Baltimore or on other aspects of urban life (the issues that face Baltimore, of course, are shared by many American cities, small and large). All Year of the City themed work will be included in reading packets and on the Writing Department’s website. Reading packets will be available in the Writing Department office (HU 242A; x2228).

Our roster—as you can see--is impressive and we’re always open to suggestions for future readers from the entire Loyola Community. Feel free to contact me at nbalbo@loyola.edu if you have questions or ideas.

Ned Balbo
Associate Professor, Affiliate
Writing Department
Loyola College in Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210-2699