Voices Readings Series 2010-2011

8:15pm @ DPC with Joe Hall (St. Mary's '04, also a previous employee of the St. Mary's Campus Store!)

Joe Hall's first book of poems is Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean Press 2010). Pigafetta has appeared on the Small Press Distribution Best Seller List and is a Poetry International Notable Book of the Year. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, HTML Giant, Barrelhouse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere. With Wade Fletcher he co-organizes the DC area reading series Cheryl's Gone. He currently teaches at the University of Maryland.

Thursday, September 23

8:15pm @ DPC with Joyce Dyer

Joyce Dyer (John S. Kenyon Professor of English and director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio) is the author of four books, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings (1993), In a Tangled Wood:  An Alzheimer’s Journey (1996), Gum-Dipped:  A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town (2003), and Goosetown:  Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood (2010), and the editor of Bloodroot:  Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (1998). She has published essays in magazines such as North American Review, cream city review, and High Plains Literary Review. Dyer has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the 2009 David B. Saunders Award in Creative Nonfiction. She was the 2009 co-winner of a chapbook contest sponsored by Word of Mouth Books. She has taught several summers at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Antioch, Ohio, as well as the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky. She is currently at work on a long project about John Brown.

Thursday, October 14

8:15pm @ DPC with Jennifer Cognard-Black

Jennifer Cognard-Black is an Associate Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she teaches nineteenth-century literature and fiction writing and is the Coordinator of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program.  Recipient of the Norton T. Dodge Award for Creative and Scholarly Achievement, her critical work includes articles in Ms. Magazine, College English, American Literary Realism, the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, and the Popular Culture Review as well as four books:  a study of cultures of letters among women writers, Narrative in the Professional Age (Routledge 2004); a writing textbook, Advancing Rhetoric (Kendall / Hunt 2006); an anthology of unpublished letters by women writers, Kindred Hands (University of Iowa Press 2006); and a forthcoming anthology of food writing, Words Rising (University of Nebraska Press 2011).  A Pushcart Prize nominee, her short fiction has appeared under the pseudonym J. Annie MacLeod in journals such as Another Chicago Magazine, The Cream City Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Literary Mama, Pisgah and, most recently, So to Speak.  In addition to her teaching, critical work, and creative writing, Cognard-Black plays piano duets with her daughter Katharine and is ever perfecting recipes for her special topics class on the literatures of food, “Books that Cook.”

Thursday, November 4

8:15pm @ DPC with Brian Gilmore & Karl Carter

Brian Gilmore was born and raised in Washington, DC. He is the author of two books of poetry, Elvis Presley is Alive and Well and Living in Harlem (Third World Press, 1993), and Jungle Nights & Soda Fountain Rags (Karibu Books, 1999). His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and he has taught poetry at the Catholic University of America and at Lorton Prison. He is currently Legislative Counsel at the City Council for the District of Columbia.

Karl Carter was born in New Orleans in 1944, and attended Tennessee State University where he began writing poetry and was awarded his B.S. degree in sociology. Carter then attended Howard University where he obtained his law degree. He practices law in Washington, D.C. and resides in Alexandria, Virginia. Carter has authored two chapbooks in the early 1970s: A Season in Sorrow and Three Poems, both published by Broadside Press in Detroit.
His poems have appeared in Presence African, Black World (in a special edition dedicated to Sterling Brown),Understanding the New Black Poetry, Off the Record, An Anthology of Poetry By Lawyers, The Legal Studies Forum, and other books and journals.

Thursday, November 18

8:15pm @ DPC with Jeffrey Hammond

Jeffrey Hammond, the George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts, has taught English and American literature, classical and biblical literature, and nonfiction writing at St. Mary’s College of Maryland since 1990. His creative nonfiction has won two Pushcart Prizes, Shenandoah’s Carter Prize for Essay, and the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize. His books include The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern (Kent State University Press, 2002), This Place Where We Are (St. Mary=s Press, 2006), Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age (Kent State University Press, 2008), and Little Big World: Collecting Louis Marx and the American Fifties (University of Iowa Press, 2010). He is currently working on a study of the Gospel of Mark as an ancient Mediterranean cultic text.

Thursday, December 2

8:15pm @ DPC with Nick Tambakeras

Nick Tambakeras has written for diverse publications, from Pittsburgh Magazine, to the Hellenic Voice, a weekly independent newspaper covering Greek-American news & interests. Recently, he completed a Master's Degree in English and Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University and was the recipient of the Frederick J. Dockstader award for outstanding fiction. Nick also operated the University Writing Center and was editor-in-chief of Thin Air Magazine, NAU's literary mag.

 Nick is currently embroiled in an exciting new project, traveling throughout the U.S. recording his (mis)adventures as creative non-fiction blog entries and as feature travel articles for publication. These recent writings can be found at http://www.hugging-the-road.com.

Thursday, January 27

8:15pm @ DPC with Gina Franco

Gina Franco is an Associate Professor of English at Knox College in Illinois. She went to undergraduate school at Smith College and attended graduate school at Cornell University. Franco has been published in many literary journals including Copper Nickel, Border Senses, The Eleventh Muse, Black Warrior Review, Seneca Review, and the Georgia Review. She also has a book of poetry published, called The Keepsake Storm and she is currently working on a manuscript of poems entitled Mother Lode, about copper mining in Arizona. She is recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize from Smith College and the Robert Chasen and Corson-Bishop Poetry Prizes from Cornell University and in 2005 Franco received Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses award.

Thursday, February 17

8:15pm @ DPC - Writer's Harvest with Jeniffer Cognard-Black & Melissa Goldthwaite

The Writer’s Harvest: A Reading for a More Sustainable Harvest with Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa Goldthwaite, the co-editors of Words Rising:  An Anthology of American Food Writing. Food is universal, adaptable, and magical:  daily, the stuff of death is transformed into the stuff of life.  To consider food as a written art form is to consider a central part of what it means to be human. Writers’ Harvest readers will connect their own culinary experiences with representations of food to share menu poems, recipe recollections, and food fictions that consider practices of food creation and consumption in larger communities and across the globe.

Melissa Goldthwaite is an Associate professor of English at Saint Joseph's University in Pennsylivania. She attended undergraduate school at  Messiah College and is a graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University. Her most recent publications include A Guide to The Norton Reader, twelfth edition and shorter twelfth edition (with Anne Fernald and Charles Hood). The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing, 6th edition. (With Cheryl Glenn) “Playing with Echo: Strategies for Teaching Repetition in the Writing Classroom.” Refiguring Prose Style. While many of her publications are critical compositions, she also is a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction, and environmental literature.

Thursday, March 3

8:15pm @ DPC with Laura-Gray Street

Laura-Gray Street is co-editor of Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, forthcoming from Trinity University Press. Her work has appeared in Many Mountains Moving, The Human Genre Project, Isotope, Gargoyle, From the Fishouse, ISLE, Shenandoah, Meridian, Blackbird, Poetry Daily, The Notre Dame Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere; selected by George Garrett for Best New Poets 2005; nominated for three Pushcart Prizes; and commissioned by the New York Festival of Song. Street has received a Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from Isotope, the Emerging Writer in Poetry Award for the Southern Women Writers Conference, the Dana Award in Poetry, and The Greensboro Review’s Annual Literary Award in Poetry. Street has an MA in English from the University of Virginia and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Thursday, March 31

8:15pm @ DPC with Daniel Groves

Daniel Groves is the author of The Lost Boys (VQR Poetry Series/University of Georgia Press).  His poems have appeared in Paris Review, Yale Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.

Thursday, April 7

8:15pm @ DPC with Shirlette Ammons

Shirlette Ammons is a poet, writer, musician and director of an arts program for children. Her second collection of poetry, entitled Matching Skin,was published by Carolina Wren Press in June 2008 and her first collection of poetry, entitled Stumphole Anthology of Bakwoods Blood (Big Drum Press) was published in September 2002. She is also vocalist songwriter for hip hop rock band, mosadi music. Her poetry and essays appear in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (edited by Nikky Finney, University of Georgia Press), What Your Mama Never Told You: True Stories About Love and Sex (edited by Tara Roberts, Houghton Mifflin), The Asheville Review and other publications. Shirlette is also a Cave Canem Fellow and has received the Kathryn H. Wallace Award for Artists In Community Service and the Durham Arts Council and United ArtsCouncil Emerging Artist Grant. Shirlette resides in Durham, North Carolina with her partner Kai, their dog, Zaji, and their cat, LaVon FitzBarrow.

Thursday, April 21

8:15pm @ DPC with Linda Bierds

Linda Bierds was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and attended the University of Washington, where she received her B.A. in 1969 and her M.A. in 1971. Her numerous books of poetry include First Hand (Putnam, 2005), The Seconds (2001), The Profile Makers (1997), The Ghost Trio (1994), which was named a Notable Book Selection by the American Library Association, Heart and Perimeter (1991), and The Stillness, the Dancing (1988).

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.

She has taught English and writing at the University of Washington since 1989, and was the director of its Creative Writing Program from 1997 until 2000. She lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington.

New Faculty Publications

Christine Adams

Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France, by Christine Adams

This far-reaching study of maternal societies in post-Revolutionary France focuses on the philanthropic work of the Society for Maternal Charity, the most prominent organization of its kind. Administered by middle-class and elite women and financed by powerful families and the government, the Society offered support to poor mothers, helping them to nurse and encouraging them not to abandon their children. In Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood, Christine Adams traces the Society's key role in shaping notions of maternity and shifting the care of poor families from the hands of charitable volunteers with religious-tinged social visions to paid welfare workers with secular goals such as population growth and patriotism.

Adams plumbs the origin and ideology of the Society and its branches, showing how elite women in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen, Marseille, Dijon, and Limoges tried to influence the maternal behavior of women and families with lesser financial means and social status. A deft analysis of the philosophy and goals of the Society details the members' own notions of good mothering, family solidarity, and legitimate marriages that structured official, elite, and popular attitudes concerning gender and poverty in France. These personal attitudes, Adams argues, greatly influenced public policy and shaped the country's burgeoning social welfare system.

Jeffrey Hammond

Little Big World: Collecting Louis Marx and the American Fifties, by Jeffrey Hammond

Jeffrey Hammond's Little Big World: Collecting Louis Marx and the American Fifties is the story of a middle-aged man's sudden compulsion to collect the toys of his childhood: specifically, themed playsets produced by the Louis Marx Toy Company. Hammond never made a conscious decision to become a collector of any kind, so he was surprised when his occasional visits to web sites turned into hours spent gazing at, and then impulsively purchasing, the tiny plastic people and animals in the Civil War set, the Fort Apache set, Roy Rogers Ranch, and Happi-Time Farm - just a few of the dozens of playsets the Marx Company produced.

Hammond interweaves childhood memories with reflections on what they reveal about the culture and values of cold war America, offering an extended meditation on toys as powerful catalysts for the imagination of both children and adults. Never sentimentalizing his childhood in an effort to get his old toys back, Hammond exposes the danges of nostalgia by casting an unsettling light on the culture of the fifties and the era's lasting impact on those who grew up in it.

"All flesh is grass," Hammond says, "but rubberized vinyl is forever." Writing in a lovably quirky voice, he not only attempts to understand his personal connection to the Marx toys but also examines the psychology of his fellow eBay denizens. In this warm, funny, and contemplative work, the reader encounters an online community of serious adult collectors who, as the author suspects, are driven to obsession by middle-aged nostalgia. When Hammond questions this preoccupation with the past, he comes to realize that his own collecting has prevented him from moving forward. With this insight, he offers an insider's take on the culture and psychology of collecting.

Novel Frames: Literature As Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture

by Joseph R. Urgo

Literature senses the wholeness of culture while noting culture's distinctive contradictions.  In this innovative study of American culture in the twentieth century Joseph R. Urgo attempts to clarify what occurs as the modes of mass media objectify cultural phenomena.  To do this he moves a novel from its time and uses it to explain another, thus demonstrating that fiction speaks across chronology and has resonance in both traditional and popular culture.

Faulkner in America

edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie

With essays by Richard Godden, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Kathryn B. McKee, Peter Nicolaison, Charles A. Peek, Noel Polk, Hortense J. Spillers, Joseph R. Urgo, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Charles Reagan Wilson

William Faulkner is Mississippi's most famous author and arguably one of the country's greatest writers. But what was his relationship with America? How did he view the nation, its traditions, its issues?

In ten essays from the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner in America looks closely at the exchange between William Faulkner the writer and his national affiliation. Collectively, the essays ask which American ideas, identities, and conflicts we should associate with Mississippi's Nobel Laureate.

Faulkner and His Contemporaries

edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie

Essays by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Deborah Clarke, Grace Elizabeth Hale, W. Kenneth Holditch, M. Thomas Inge and Donária Romeiro Carvalho Inge, Donald M. Kartiganer, George Monteiro, Danièle Pitavy-Souques, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Joseph R. Urgo.

Faulkner and His Contemporaries explores the relationship between the Nobel laureate, ensconced in his "postage stamp of native soil," and the contemporary world of letters within which he created his masterpieces.

Faulkner's Inheritance

edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie

Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith, and Priscilla Wald

Faulkner's Inheritance is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction, including his own family history, Jim Crow laws, contemporary fashion, popular culture, and literature.

Faulkner and Ecology of the South

edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie

The essays collected in Faulkner and the Ecology of the South explore Faulkner's environmental imagination, seeking what Ann Fisher-Wirth calls the "ecological counter-melody" of his texts. "Ecology" was not a term in common use outside the sciences in Faulkner's time. However, the word "environment" seems to have held deep meaning for Faulkner. Often he repeated his abiding interest in "man in conflict with himself, with his fellow man, or with his time and place, his environment."

Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!

by Joseph R. Urgo and Noel Polk

Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.