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Fourth Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Saturday, April 6, 2013

The University of Cincinnati Composition Program invites proposals for the fourth annual interdisciplinary graduate student conference. Our emphasis this year focuses on being undisciplined: breaking down walls, bending rules, and questioning the rigid structure of our fields. The deadline for proposal submissions is December 30, 2012. Click here for more information and updates.

Jedediah Berry and Jennifer Clarvoe

September 7, 2012, 4:00 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Jedediah Berry is the author of a novel, The Manual of Detection, winner of the Crawford Award and the Dashiell Hammett Prize. His short stories have appeared in journals and anthologies including Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, Fairy Tale Review, Best New American Voices, and Best American Fantasy. He has worked as an editor at Small Beer Press, and he currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets & Writers.

Jennifer Clarvoe is the author of two books of poetry: Invisible Tender (Fordham, 2000) and Counter-Amores (Chicago, 2011). Prizes for her work include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Poets Out Loud Prize, and the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is Professor of English at Kenyon College.

James Longenbach

September 28, 2012, 1:00 p.m (lecture) and 4:00 p.m. (reading)
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

James Longenbach is a poet and a critic whose most recent book of poems, The Iron Key (Norton, 2010), is a meditation on the conditions and consequences of beauty. His other poetry collections include Draft of a Letter (Chicago, 2007), Fleet River (Chicago, 2003), and Threshold (Chicago, 1998). His critical works include The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf, 2008), The Resistance to Poetry(Chicago, 2004), Modern Poetry after Modernism (Oxford, 1997), Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (Oxford, 1991), Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford, 1988), and Modernist Poetics of History (Princeton, 1987). He teaches at the University of Rochester, where he is the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English.

Emerging Fiction Writers Festival

Featuring Ron Currie, Jr., Danielle Evans, Caitlin Horrocks, and Ben Loory
October 10 and October 11, 2012, 7:00 p.m. (readings)
427 Engineering Research Center
October 11 and October 12, 2012, 11:00 a.m. (panels)
TUC 425

Ron Currie, Jr. is the author of God Is Dead and Everything Matters. He's received the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, as well as the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He'll publish a new book, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, in February 2013.

Danielle Evans is the winner of the 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree. A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories 2008, and The Best American Short Stories 2010. Her collection of stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, is her first book. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collection This Is Not Your City. Her stories appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories 2011, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, and elsewhere, and have won awards including the Plimpton Prize and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellowship. She teaches at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Ben Loory's fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, Gargoyle Magazine, and The Antioch Review, as well as on NPR's This American Life, and live at Selected Shorts. His book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day was published by Penguin in 2011, and was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Starbucks Coffee Bookish Reading Club. He lives in Los Angeles.

Julia Johnson and Jennifer Habel

November 2, 2012, 4:00 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Julia Johnson grew up in New Orleans. Her first book of poems, Naming the Afternoon, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2002 and was the 2003 winner of the Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Third Coast, Blip, Poetry International, Cake Train, Blackbird, Washington Square, and The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume IV: Louisiana (2012). Her new book, The Falling Horse, was published by Factory Hollow Press in January 2012. She holds degrees from Hollins College (B.A.) and from The University of Virginia (M.F.A.) where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She has taught at Hollins University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Virginia Tech, and in the Center of Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She recently joined the faculty at The University of Kentucky as Associate Professor of English.

Jennifer Habel is the author of Good Reason, winner of the 2011 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Gulf Coast, LIT, The Massachusetts Review, The Southeast Review, Blackbird, and other journals. Her chapbook In the Little House won the 2008 Copperdome Prize. She is the creative writing coordinator at the University of Cincinnati.

Tracy K. Smith

November 30, 2012, 4:00 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Tracy Smith is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. The collection draws on sources as disparate as Arthur C. Clarke and David Bowie, and is in part an elegiac tribute to her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. Duende (2007) won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body's Question (2003) was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005. After her undergraduate work at Harvard, Smith earned her MFA at Columbia before going on to be a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University, and has also taught at Columbia, City University of New York, and the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Brooklyn.

Matt Bell and Steve Scafidi

January 11, 2013, 4:00 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Matt Bell is the author of Cataclysm Baby, a novella, and How They Were Found, a collection of fiction. His debut novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods will be published by Soho Press in June 2013. He is the Senior Editor at Dzanc Books, where he also edits the literary magazine The Collagist, and he teaches creative writing at Northern Michigan University.

Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (2001), For Love of Common Words (2006), and The Cabinetmaker's Window (forthcoming) from Louisiana State University Press. For twenty years he has worked as a cabinetmaker and currently teaches part-time in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Scafidi lives in Summit Point, West Virginia with his wife and two children.

Gregory Orr

February 1, 2013, 2:00 p.m. (lecture) and 4:00 p.m. (reading)
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. His most recent volume, The River Inside the River, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2013. His other volumes of poetry include The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems and City of Salt, Finalist for the LA Times Poetry Prize. Orr is also a writer of nonfiction and personal essays. His memoir The Blessing was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the fifty best nonfiction books of 2002. His prose book, Poetry as Survival, an extended meditation on the dynamics and function of the personal lyric, was characterized by Adrienne Rich as "a wise and passionate book." Orr has received many awards and fellowships, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence.

Orr teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Charles Baxter

February 12, 2013, 7:00 p.m.
427 Engineering Research Center

Charles Baxter is the author, most recently, of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, published by Pantheon in January, 2011. He has received the Award of Merit in the Short Story and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Rea Award in the Short Story in 2012. His third novel, The Feast of Love, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into a film by Robert Benton. He is the author of four additional novels, four books of stories, a book of poems, and two collections of essays on fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, among other journals and magazines. His fiction has been widely anthologized and translated into many languages. He lives in Minneapolis and is currently the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.

Marjorie Celona, Luke Geddes, and Don Peteroy

February 22, 2013, 4:00 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Marjorie Celona's first novel, Y, was published in 2012 by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Canada and is forthcoming in 2013 from Free Press/Simon & Schuster (US), Faber & Faber (UK), Suhrkamp (Germany), Gallimard (France), and De Bezige Bij (Netherlands). She is the recipient of the John C. Schupes fellowship and Iowa Arts fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Olive B. O'Connor fellowship from Colgate University, and was recently writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, she lives in Cincinnati with her fiancé, Brian Trapp, and their dog, Betsy Lou.

Luke Geddes has published stories in Hayden's Ferry Review, Conjunctions, Mid American Review, The Collagist, and other journals. I Am a Magical Teenage Princess is his first book.

Don Peteroy is a first year PhD candidate in Creative Writing at UC. He is the author of the novella Wally (Burrow Press 2012), and winner of the 2012 Playboy College Fiction Contest. His stories have appeared in Cream City Review, Eleven Eleven, Permafrost, Chattahoochee Review, Santa Clara Review, Yemassee, and many others. He's been nominated for a Pushcart Award, and his story "Confessions of a Misunderstood Sidekick" was adapted for the stories on stage series in Sacramento, CA. He has recently completed his 600-page novel, My Helicopter Heart.

Julia Koets, Matt McBride, and Ruth Williams

March 1, 2013, 4:00 p.m
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Julia Koets' first book of poetry Hold Like Owls was published in April 2012 (USC Press). Koets' poems have been published in numerous journals, including Indiana Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Euphony. While getting her MFA in poetry at the University of South Carolina, Koets received several grants from the National Science Foundation for interdisciplinary research and poetry. She is currently working on her PhD in poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

Matt McBride has published work in Cream City Review, FENCE, Forklift, Meridian, Mississippi Review, and Smartish Pace amongst others. His latest chapbook, Cities Lit by the Light Caught in Photographs, was published last March by H_NGM_N books. Currently, he is the assistant poetry editor for Memorious magazine.

Ruth Williams is the author of Conveyance, a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press (2012). Her poems have been published in jubilat, Third Coast, no tell motel, H_ngm_n, Bone Bouquet, Barrelhouse, Barn Owl Review, and Bateau among others. In 2011-2012, Ruth was a Fulbright scholar in Seoul, South Korea; currently, she is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati.

Claudia Emerson

2013 Elliston Poet-in-Residence

Master Class: Sentence, Line, and Syntax
March 14, 2013: 2 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Poetry Reading
March 15, 2013, 4:00 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Claudia Emerson received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Late Wife: Poems (LSU Press, 2005). Secure the Shadow, her newest collection, was published in 2012. She is also the author of Figure Studies: Poems, Pinion: An Elegy, and Pharaoh, Pharaoh; all volumes are published in Dave Smith's Southern Messenger Poets series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals. Emerson is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2008-2010. She is professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Lauren Groff

March 28, 2013, 7:00 p.m.
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Lauren Groff is the author of the novels Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton and the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Her fiction has won Pushcart and PEN O.Henry awards and has appeared in journals including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, One Story, Ecotone, and Glimmer Train, and two editions of the Best American Short Stories anthology. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.

Claudia Emerson

2013 Elliston Poet-in-Residence
Lecture: On Fashioning a More Careful Measure
April 5, 2013, 4:00 p.m. (lecture)
Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Claudia Emerson received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Late Wife: Poems (LSU Press, 2005). Secure the Shadow, her newest collection, was published in 2012. She is also the author of Figure Studies: Poems, Pinion: An Elegy, and Pharaoh, Pharaoh; all volumes are published in Dave Smith's Southern Messenger Poets series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals. Emerson is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2008-2010. She is professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Ropes Lecture Series Archive

• 2011: The Novel and the City
• 2010: Early Modern and Post-Modern Performance
• 2009: The Bible and Contemporary Culture
• 2008: Violence and Literature: The Humanities in a Post-9-11 World
• 2007: Writing Sex
• 2006: Shakespeares Past and Present
• 2005: Literature and the Environment
• 2004: Languages of Imperialism