MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment

Iowa State University

Ames, IA 

S C H E D U L E   O F   E V E NT S

Please Don't Come Back From the Moon & Other Stories: a Fiction Reading

Dean Bakopoulos             

• Thursday, September 24 ♦ 7:00 PM ♦ M-Shop, Memorial Union

Dean Bakopoulos was born and raised in metro Detroit, which is the setting of his first novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt), a New York Times Notable Book. He has lectured at Michigan, Cornell, UW-Madison, and other universities about the economic and environmental problems facing the post-industrial Rust Belt, and has published related essays and criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Progressive, The Believer, and Real Simple.

The winner of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he is the former director of both the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Wisconsin Humanities Council. He is currently at work on a book of nonfiction, as well as a television series based on his first novel. His second novel, My American Unhappiness, will be published in late 2010.

People I Wanted to Be:  A Fiction Reading

Gina Ochsner                                             

• Thursday, October 15 ♦ 3:30 PM ♦ 212 Ross Hall

Gina Ochsner's stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other magazines, and have received awards such as the Raymond Carver Prize and the Chelsea Award for Short Fiction.

 Her first collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. It also won the Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction and the PNBA Book Award for short stories and was an Austin Chronicle Top Ten Pick.  Ochsner's third book, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2010.

The Sky Begins at Your Feet: a Reading and Discussion of Bioregionalism

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg              

• Tuesday, November 3  ♦ 7:00 PM ♦ Pioneer Rm., Memorial Union

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate and one of the founders of the Bioregional Congress, will read from her book The Sky Begins at Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body.

Mirriam-Goldberg is an instructor at Goddard College, where she teaches transformative language arts. Her books include four collections of poetry, the writing guide Write Where You Are, and the anthology The Power of Words.

6th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Creative Imagination

Things Fall Apart: Finding Beauty in a Broken World
 

♦  See Full Schedule  ♦

Friday, January 29 - Sunday, January 31, 2010

Iowa State University

Memorial Union & Ames Public Library

Ames, IA

An Environmental Literary Festival Featuring Reading, Panel Discussions,

Poetry Performances, Documentary Films, Booksignings, and Receptions.

 Scheduled Guests:

 ♦ Terry Tempest Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, was published in 2009.

♦  Rick Bass is the author of over twenty books, including The Watch, Oil Notes, The Nine-Mile Wolves, The Lost Grizzlies, The Hermit’s Story, and The Lives of Rocks.  

♦  Mary Swander is the Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa and the author of several books, including Succession: Poems; The Girls on the Roof; Driving the Body Back; Desert Pilgrim; and Out of This World.   

♦  Patricia Smith is a four-time national poetry slam champion and the author of several books, including Blood Dazzler, Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns, Big Talk and Life According to Motown.

♦  Benjamin Percy is the author of The Language of Elk, Refresh, Refresh, and a novel, The Wilding, forthcoming in 2010. 

♦  Noah Hutton is a filmmaker whose recent documentary, Crude Independence, chronicles the impact a large oil find is having on a peaceful farming community in western North Dakota. 

All Events are Free & Open to the Public  ♦ No Registration Required

Strange As This Weather Has Been: a Fiction Reading

Ann Pancake                           

• Monday, February 22 ♦ 7:00 PM ♦ Sun Room, Memorial Union

Ann Pancake is a native of West Virginia. Her first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, features a southern West Virginia family devastated by mountaintop removal mining.   Based on interviews and real events, the novel was one of Kirkus Review's Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007, won the 2007 Weatherford Prize, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award. 

Pancake’s collection of short stories, Given Ground, received the 2000 Bakeless award. She has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, and a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers, and New Stories from the South. She earned her BA in English at West Virginia University and a PHD in English Literature from the University of Washington. Currently, she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison: a Poetry Reading

Camile Dungy                

• Thursday, April 15  ♦ 7:00 PM ♦ Pioneer Rm., Memorial Union

Camile T. Dungy is the author of the poetry collection, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award and the Library of Virginia 2007 Literary Award. Camille T. Dungy has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf.

MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment
Department of English
Iowa State University
206 Ross Hall, Ames, IA
www.engl.iastate.edu
MFA Program Information: englgrad@iastate.edu