The series is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Honors Program, BACHE Visiting Writers, UAB Student Government Association, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and Friends of the Writing Program.
The 2014-2015 Writers' Series
Chantel Acevedo
Chantel Acevedo (photo by Orlando Acevedo). When: Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 6:00 p.m.Where:Hulsey Recital Hall
Part of the BACHE Visiting Writers series
Chantel Acevedo has received many awards for her fiction, including the Latino International Book Award and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship. A Cuban-American born and raised in Miami, Florida, Acevedo has spent time in Japan and New Zealand as a Fulbrighter, and currently resides in Auburn, Alabama, with her family, where she teaches at Auburn University. Acevedo’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, North American Review, and Chattahoochee Review, among others. She is the editor of the Southern Humanities Review, the founder of the annual Auburn Writers Conference, and the author of two novels, Love and Ghost Letters (St. Martin’s Press) and A Falling Star (Carolina Wren Press), as well as a novel for young adults, Song of the Red Cloak. A new novel, The Distant Marvels, is forthcoming from Europa Editions. www.chantelacevedo.com
Michael Sowder
Michael Sowder. When: Thursday, October 23, 2014, 6:00 p.m.Where:AEIVA Lecture Hall
Described by David Bottoms as “one of our finest spiritual poets,” Michael Sowder writes about wilderness, fatherhood, Buddhism, and poetics. His new collection, House Under the Moon, investigates the challenge of living a contemplative life in the contemporary world. The Empty Boat, his first book of poetry, won the T. S. Eliot Award, and his chapbook, A Calendar of Crows, won the inaugural Diagram/New Michigan Press Award. His poetry has appeared in such venues as Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Five Points, Green Mountains Review, Poet Lore, Sufi Journal, the anthology New Poets of the American West, and the New York Times Online. His study of Walt Whitman’s poetry, Whitman’s Ecstatic Union, was published by Routledge Press, and his essays appear frequently in such places as the Buddhist magazine, Shambhala Sun. Sowder recently traveled to India on a Fulbright Fellowship to study Indian literature and religion and work on a spiritual memoir. He is a professor of English at Utah State University, in Logan, Utah, where he lives at the foot of the Bear River Mountains with his wife, the writer Jennifer Sinor, and their boys, Aidan and Kellen.
Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones (picture by Rayon Richards).When: Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 6:00 p.m.Where:Hulsey Recital Hall
Part of the BACHE Visiting Writers series
Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, where she spent most of her childhood. Although she has not lived in her hometown for over a decade, much of her writing centers on the urban south. Jones is the author of three novels: Silver Sparrow (Algonquin, 2011), which was named one of the year’s best by O Magazine, Library Journal, Slate, and Salon; The Untelling (Grand Central, 2006); and Leaving Atlanta (Warner Books, 2002). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Artist Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and The Hurston/Wright Foundation, Jones is an associate professor of English at Rutgers-Newark University. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Believer, and New Stories From The South. www.tayarijones.com
Emily Rapp
Emily Rapp. When: Thursday, January 22, 2015, 6:00 p.m.Where:AEIVA Lecture Hall
Emily Rapp is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (BloomsburyUSA) and The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press), which was a New York Times bestseller and an Editor’s Pick. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. Her work has appeared in VOGUE, the New York Times, The Times (UK), Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, The Sun, TIME, The Week, the Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. She is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, and Role/Reboot, and her work has been widely anthologized. She holds the Joseph M. Russo Chair in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, and is on faculty in the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert MFA program.
Brian Turner
Brian Turner (photo by Kim Buchheit). When: Wednesday, February 25, 2015, 6:00 p.m.Where:Hulsey Recital Hall
Part of the BACHE Visiting Writers series
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise (2010) and Here, Bullet (2005), which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA Best in the West award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. He also has a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (2014) that retraces his war experience. Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published with a feature-length documentary film of the same name. Turner was also featured in Operation Homecoming, a documentary that explores firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has lived abroad in South Korea. In 2009, Turner was selected as one of fifty United States Artists Fellows. www.brianturner.org
Randy Blythe
Randy Blythe. When: Wednesday, March 11, 2015, 6:00 p.m.Where:Hulsey Recital Hall
Randy Blythe was born in Alabama and studied at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Alabama. He edited Aura from 1986 to 1988, then co-founded Birmingham Poetry Review, co-editing (1988-1998) and assistant-editing (1998-2008) that publication for two decades. Blythe lives in Birmingham, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing. He has published poems in numerous little magazines, among them The Laurel Review, Tar River Poetry, South Carolina Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Black Warrior Review.
