Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Celebrating Romeo Oriogun: Winner of the Nigerian Prize for Literature

Thursday, November 3^rd | 7 PM

Gold Room | Memorial Union

Link to Lectures Program Event: https://www.lectures.iastate.edu/lectures/celebrating-romeo-oriogun-winner-nigerian-prize-literature

Description: Poet and essayist Romeo Oriogun has been awarded the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature for his poetry collection, Nomad. Judges for the $100,000 prize noted that Oriugun’s collection contained “fresh language and a nostalgic engagement with the themes of exile and displacement.”

Mr. Oriogun is a Visiting Innovation Fellow, teaching this year in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Environment in the Department of English. The award ceremony was held on October 14 at the Eko Convention Centre at Eko Hotel and Suites in Lagos, Nigeria. The night, which was themed “Touching the Stars,” kicked off with a keynote address from former Head of State and President of Nigeria Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.

The NLNG Prize for Literature (also known as the Nigeria Prize for Literature) annually honors a published book by a Nigerian writer in a specific genre under review. With a cash prize of $100,000, it is regarded as one of the world’s richest prizes.

Short Bio: Romeo Oriogun, a Nigerian poet and essayist, is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska) and three chapbooks. He is the winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. A finalist for the Lambda Prize for poetry and for The Future Awards African Prize for Literature, he has received fellowships and support from Ebedi International Writers Residency, Harvard University, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Oregon Institute for Creative Research, and the IIE- Artist Protection Fund. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Havard Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, The Common, and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have been translated into several languages.

Links to News Coverage:

https://brittlepaper.com/2022/10/romeo-oriogun-wins-the-100000-nigeria-prize-for-literature/

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/entertainment/artsbooks/559861-romeo-oriogun-wins-100000-nlng-literature-prize.html

https://thewillnigeria.com/news/displacing-perennial-contenders-romeo-oriogun-wins-nigeria-prize-for-literature/

Friday, February 3, 2023

Home Voices Festival

Date: Friday, February 3^rd | 1 – 5 PM

Details: 1:00 – 4:00 PM | Ames Public Library | 515 Douglas Avenue

Literary readings & panel discussion with invited authors

4:00: 5:00 PM: Dog-Eared Books | 203 Main Street

Booksigning & catered reception

The 2023 Home Voices Festival brings together alumni of the Creative Writing and Environment program at Iowa State University. Invited alumni this year are Ana Hurtado (Ecuador), Cathleen Bascom (Kansas), Chris Wiewiora (Florida), and Tegan Swanson (Wisconsin).

The Festival celebrates the recent book publications of invited alumni and is the kick-off event of the spring 2023 Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writers Series at Iowa State, which features additional nationally and internationally known authors who will be visiting the ISU campus for public lectures during the Spring 2023 semester.

Home Voices Authors

ANA HURTADO is a speculative fiction writer and a Clarion West 2022 alumn. She is a graduate of Iowa State University’s M.F.A. program in Creative Writing & Environment, and her work has been published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, among others. LeVar Burton read one of her stories for his podcast LeVar Burton Reads. She is a professor of creative writing at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. You can find her via her website www.anahurtadowrites.com or on Twitter at @ponciovicario.

CATHLEEN BASCOM is the 10th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, the first woman to serve as bishop of the diocese. Bascom grew up in Denver, and she earned a B.A. in English from the University of Kansas in 1984 and an MA in Modern Literature from Exeter University (UK) in 1991. She earned her M.Div. at Seabury-Western in 1990 and a Doctor of Ministry in Preaching from Iliff School of Theology in Denver in 2005. In 2017 she completed an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. In 2018 she was named to a three-year term on the Episcopal Church’s Task Force on Care of Creation and Environmental Racism. She also is the author of a novel, Of Green Stuff Woven, published by Light Messages Publishing. She is married to the writer Tim Bascom, and they have two adult sons, Conrad and Luke. https://episcopal-ks.org/about-the-bishop/

CHRIS WIEWIORA earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University in 2014. While at ISU, he served as

the managing editor of the literary magazine Flyway and after graduating the National Endowment for Humanities deemed him a Humanities Scholar for his KHOI 89.1FM radio show “Book Central” where he interviewed authors writing from the Central Time Zone. A portion of his nonfiction MFA thesis about growing up in and going back to Warsaw, Poland was published as the chapbook The Distance Is More Than An Ocean by Finishing Line Press. His writing about relationships has been published on the Hairpin, the Nervous Breakdown, the Rumpus, and many other online magazines that begin with “the.” He has contributed to the Good Men Project for more than a decade, including his column “Divorce in the Time of Corona.” His writing has been widely anthologized in Best American Sports Writing, Best Food Writing, the Norton Reader, Back to the Lake, the Best of Wanderlust, and many others. The Chris Wiewiora Papers including drafts and manuscripts are held at Iowa State University’s Special Collections and University Archives in the Parks Library.

Originally from Minnesota, TEGAN SWANSON has made home at Nottingham Co-operative in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Lalo Loor Dry Forest Reserve along the Pacific coast of Ecuador, in the historic Orange Gentleman of Ames, Iowa, along the banks of the Rhône river in Lyon, France, and in a solar-powered hut on Namdrik Atoll of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As an advocate-artist, she has offered undergraduate composition and creative writing classes, taught ESL and environmental science with tiny humans and adults, facilitated therapeutic creative workshops for the National Alliance for Mental Illness of Central Iowa, worked with young folks in Madison’s public high schools and at Ames’ Rosedale Shelter, and served as a legal advocate for survivors of violence in Dane County, Wisconsin. Currently, she is the Systems Change Coordinator for End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, where she advocates for survivor-centered policy change & transformative justice, and serves on the MMIW/R Task Force. She loves: Lake Superior and the North Coast; volunteer dill and flowering perennials; fresh fish and wild blueberries; hiking near & snorkeling in large bodies of salt water; horse therapy; collecting artifacts for her ever-expanding wunderkammer; cooking for loved ones; and paradigms, tangents, and queer, healing-centered emergent strategy. Things We Found When the Water Went Down is her debut novel from Catapult Co. She is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University, where she was a Pearl Hogrefe fellow. https://teganniaswanson.org/

SPONSORS

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Michael Walsh | Queer Ecology: A Moderated Conversation on Creativity, Craft, and Editing

March 30 | 2:00 – 3:00 PM
Oak Room | Memorial Union

In this discussion of craft, Michael Walsh sits down with ISU poet Zoë Fay-Stindt to discuss his writing process and his recent work assembling Queer Nature, an anthology that amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. This groundbreaking anthology showcases over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, offering a new context for the canon of poetry about the natural world. Moderator: Zoe Fay-Stindt

Michael Walsh | Poetry as a Wedge into the World

March 30 | 7:30 PM
South Ballroom | Memorial Union

Michael Walsh reads from his poetry and shares offerings from his groundbreaking new anthology, Queer Nature.

Michael Walsh received his BA in English from Knox College and his M.F.A. in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. He is the editor of Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House, May 2022). His poetry books include Creep Love (Autumn House Press, Lambda Finalist), The Dirt Riddles (University of Arkansas Press), and two chapbooks, Adam Walking the Garden and Sleepwalks (Red Dragonfly Press). His poems and stories have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Great River Review, The Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. After residing in Minneapolis for more than two decades, Michael now lives in a valley among coulees and springs in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, where his eco-queer and literary teachings are taking shape. https://www.michaeltwalsh.com/

LINKS FOR FURTHER INTEREST | REVIEWS & ARTICLES

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Yvette Nolan | The Unplugging: (Re)Writing the Apocalypse

February 28 | 5:00 PM
Online Event | https://iastate.webex.com/iastate/j.php?MTID=m47efe5857ba7fb28f7acdbce186948b7

In this online event, Yvette Nolan will discuss her creative work as a playwright and theatrical director. Ms. Nolan’s play, The Unplugging, tells the story of two women who are exiled from their village in a post-apocalyptic world, after passing child-bearing age. They rely on their traditional wisdom to survive. But when a stranger from their village seeks their help, the women must decide if they will use their knowledge of the past to help the society that rejected them. Ms. Nolan’s talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by ISU playwright and creative writing professor, Charissa Menefee.

Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, director and dramaturg. Her works include the play The Unplugging, the dance-opera Bearing, the libretto Shawnadithit. She co-created, with Joel Bernbaum and Lancelot Knight, the verbatim play Reasonable Doubt, about relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan. From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts in Canada. Her book, Medicine Shows, about Indigenous performance in Canada was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. Born in Prince Albert, raised in Winnipeg, she currently lives in Saskatoon, where she is pursuing her Masters in Public Policy at Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Authors/N/Nolan-Yvette

LINKS FOR FURTHER INTEREST | REVIEWS & ARTICLES

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

CREDITLINE PHOTO: Ivo van der Bent. 22-01-2019 Amitav Ghosh in Amsterdam.

The Great Derangement: Writing and Researching Climate Change Narratives

March 22 | 2:00 – 3:00 PM
Room 3560 | Memorial Union

In this moderated conversation about craft, Amitav Ghosh will discuss his process of writing and researching the complex topics contained in his works, including his award-winning environmental novels and his two recent works of research nonfiction, The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Moderated by Debra Marquart, ISU professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment.

Amitav Ghosh | The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

March 22 | 7:00 PM
Sun Room | Memorial Union

Award Winning Author, Environmentalist & Climate Advocate, Amitav Ghosh will read from and discuss The Nutmeg’s Curse. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, The Nutmeg’s Curse traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. Gun Island, was released in September 2019. Ghosh’s first-ever book in verse, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, was published February 2021. His latest book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, was released in October, 2021. www.authorsunbound.com/amitav-ghosh

Livestream link: https://www.lectures.iastate.edu/lectures/nutmegs-curse-parables-planet-crisis

LINKS FOR FURTHER INTEREST | REVIEWS & ARTICLES

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

The Farmer’s Lawyer | Researching & Writing a Legal Narrative

April 18 | 2:00 – 3:00 PM
Gold Room | Memorial Union

In this moderated conversation about craft, author and lawyer Sarah Vogel will discuss her process of researching and assembling materials from her landmark class action lawsuit into her award-winning book, The Farmer’s Lawyer, an unforgettable true story of a young lawyer’s impossible legal battle to stop the federal government from foreclosing on thousands of family farmers.

Sarah Vogel | The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm

April 18 | 7:00 PM
The Great Hall | Memorial Union

EVENT DESCRIPTION: Sarah Vogel will read from and discuss her book, The Farmer’s Lawyer, the riveting story of the class action lawsuit, Coleman V. Block, which she won against the USDA’s Farmers Home Administration to protect 240,000 family farmers facing foreclosure. In the early 1980s, farmers were suffering through the worst economic crisis to hit rural America since the Great Depression. Land prices were down, operating costs and interest rates were up, and severe weather devastated crops. Instead of receiving assistance from the government as they had in the 1930s, these hardworking family farmers were threatened with foreclosure by the very agency that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to help them.

In this David and Goliath legal battle reminiscent of A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich, Sarah Vogel brought a national class action lawsuit, which pitted her against the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, in her fight for family farmers’ Constitutional rights. It was her first case. The Farmer’s Lawyer documents how the farm economy we all depend on for our daily bread almost fell apart due to the willful neglect of those charged to protect it, and what we can learn from Sarah’s battle as a similar calamity looms large on our horizon once again.

BIO: Sarah Vogel is the first woman elected state Commissioner of Agriculture in US history, and one of the nation’s foremost agriculture lawyers. She has received numerous awards and honors, including a Distinguished Service Award from the American Agricultural Law Association and a Lifetime Achievement award from the Democratic Nonpartisan League of North Dakota. Vogel is best known for her work as lead counsel on the historic national class action case, Coleman v. Block which is also the subject of her memoir, The Farmer’s Lawyer (Bloomsbury, 2021). Library Journal calls the book, “on par with Erin Brockovich.” Vogel has also served as co-counsel on the Keepseagle USDA race discrimination case and has been hailed “a giant killer in ag law” by The Nation. She currently serves as a Member of the Agriculture Subcommittee to USDA Equity Commission and speaks nationwide.

LINKS FOR FURTHER INTEREST | REVIEWS & ARTICLES

Series Sponsors: Pearl Hogrefe Fund, Humanities Iowa, ISU Lectures Program, Sketch Magazine, MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment, Department of English.

WHERE SOCIAL & ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MEET

The Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series is made possible each year by funding from the Pearl Hogrefe Fund and the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. This year the series partners with Humanities Iowa, the Ames Public Library, the Signal Poetry Festival, the ISU Lectures Program, and the English Department Goldtrap Lecture Series to bring the following authors under the theme of “Where Social & Environmental Justice Meet.”

Friday September 13, 2019

Poets, Indigo Moor & Lee Ann Roripaugh — Signal Poetry Festival Reading

Friday, September 13
Public Poetry Reading
Ames Public Library
7:00 PM

Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of five collections of poems. Her first collection, Beyond Heart Mountain, was selected by Ishmael Reed as a National Poetry Series winner. Her second, Year of the Snake, was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award. Her third collection, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, was lauded as “masterful” and a “gorgeous canticle” (Maura Stanton). Her fourth, Dandarians, was described as “a work of beauty and resilience” (Srikanth Reddy). Her fifth collection is tsunami vs. the fukushima 50. Roripaugh has received an Archibald Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, the Frederick Manfred Award from the Western Literature Association, the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets prize. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review and directs the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota, as well as being the state’s Poet Laureate. She resides in Vermillion.

Poet Laureate of Sacramento, Indigo Moor is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer. His first book of poetry, Tap-Root, was published by Main Street Rag’s in their Editor’s Select Series. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His third book, In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers, was also an Editor’s Select choice from Main Street Rag. Three of his short plays, Harvest, Shuffling, and The Red and Yellow Quartet debuted at the 60 Million Plus Theatre’s Spring Playwright’s festival. His full-length stage play, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award and has been optioned for a full-length film. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, Indigo Moor is a Cave Canem Fellow, an advisory board member for the Sacramento Poetry Center, a resident artist at 916 ink, and a graduate member of the Artist’s Residency Institute for Teaching Artists.

ADDITIONAL EVENT:

Informal Craft Talk — Indigo Moor & Lee Ann Roripaugh
Friday, September 13
2:00 – 3:30 PM
Ross 212

Monday, October 28, 2019

Rob Nixon — Environmental Martyrs and the Fate of the Forest
Monday, October 28, 7 PM
Sun Room, Memorial Union

In this talk, Nixon will address the current surge in environmental martyrdom against the backdrop of the resource wars in the Amazon and beyond. The talk will offer an international perspective on the value of our planet’s inhabited forests and the threats to their viability. Nixon asks: what is the relationship between the sacrificial figure of the environmental martyr and the proliferation of sacrifice zones under neoliberal globalization? And what is the relationship between the fallen martyr and the felled tree? In conjunction with the 2019-2020 Department of English Goldtrap Speaker Series

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and public intellectual working in the environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. He holds the Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Aeon, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Slate, Truthout, Huffington Post, Edge Effects, Times Literary Supplement, Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere.

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Kristen Iversen — Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Tuesday, December 3, 7 pm
Sun Room, Memorial Union

In this lecture, Kristen Iversen will read from and discuss her process of researching her award-winning work of nonfiction, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, which has been chosen by more than 25 universities for their Common Read programs and is soon to be released as a documentary.

Kristen Iversen’s books include the award-winning Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats; Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth; Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction; the anthologies Doom with a View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of Rocky Flats and Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen (co-edited with David Lazar), and a forthcoming literary biography of Nikola Tesla. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, American Scholar, The Nation, Fourth Genre, and others, and she has appeared on PBS, C-Span, NPR’s Fresh Air, and BBC World Service’s Outlook. Iversen has lectured widely across the US and abroad. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and Literary Nonfiction Editor of the Cincinnati Review.

Kristen Iversen
Tuesday, December 3
Craft Talk: Research, Art, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Creative Nonfiction
2 – 3:30 pm
Ross 212

Of further interest: Follow link to Full Body Burden Documentary Teaser

Friday, January 31, 2020

MFA Program Home Voices Festival
Friday, January 31, 3-5 PM (reading & panel discussions)
Ames Public Library

Join us for this celebration of alumni of the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment. This yearly festival features readings and craft discussions with alums of the MFA program who have recently published books.

Sarah Burke is the author of Blueprints, which won the 2018 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize Book Award. Winner of the 2019 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize from Crazyhorse and a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s Eleventh Annual Poetry Contest, she holds an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University. Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, Wildness, and other journals. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing community and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and daughter.

Joseph J. Capista’s collection Intrusive Beauty was selected by Beth Ann Fennelly for Ohio University Press’s 2018 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Poems by Capista have appeared in Agni, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, and Ploughshares, and he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He holds an MA from Iowa State University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He teaches in the Department of English at Towson University.

Matty Layne Glasgow is a poet and teaching artist from Sugar Land, Texas. He is the author of the collection deciduous qween, selected by Richard Blanco as the winner of the 2017 Benjamin Saltman Award. He received his MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University in 2018 and teaches with Writers in the Schools in Houston. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies and appear in or are forthcoming from The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Grist, Houston Public Media, Ecotone, BOAAT, Muzzle, Underblong and elsewhere. Matty is the recipient of a Vice Presidential Fellowship from the University of Utah where he will begin work on his Ph.D. and serve as the WITS Coordinator this fall.

Gary J. Whitehead’s fourth collection of poems, Strange What Rises, was published by Terrapin Books in 2019. His third collection, A Glossary of Chickens, was selected for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published by Princeton University Press in 2013. Previous books include Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps and The Velocity of Dust. He has also authored three chapbooks of poetry, two of which were winners of national competitions. His writing awards include, among others, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University, and the PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency Award. His poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, the Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, the Guardian’s Poem of the Week, the BBC’s Words and Music program, the BBC’s Natural Histories program, and Tracy K. Smith’s podcast The Slow Down. He has also been awarded the Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award. His poems have appeared widely, most notably in The New Yorker. He lives in northern New Jersey and teaches English at Tenafly High School.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Rick Bass — The Traveling Feast: On the Road and At the Table with My Heroes
Tuesday, February 18
8 PM, Gallery

Author and environmental activist, Rick Bass is the author of over two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction including Why I Came West, Ninemile Wolves, The Watch: Stories, All the Land to Hold Us, and The Traveling Feast: On the Road and At the Table with My Heroes. His nonfiction has been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Science Writing, and he has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, and his work been excerpted in and received commendations from many magazines including O, The Oprah Magazine, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. In 2017, Bass was awarded The Story Prize for his short fiction collection, For a Little While. His stories and articles have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Narrative, Men’s Journal, Esquire, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Harper’s, and Orion.

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Katy Yocom — Three Ways to Disappear
Tuesday, March 10, 7 PM
Gallery, Memorial Union

In her debut novel, Three Ways to Disappear, Katy Yocom explores the story of journalist, Sarah DeVaughan. Leaving behind a nomadic and dangerous career as a journalist, DeVaughan returns to India, the country of her childhood and a place of unspeakable family tragedy, to help preserve the endangered Bengal tigers. Meanwhile, at home in Kentucky, her sister, Quinn—also deeply scarred by the past and herself a keeper of secrets—tries to support her sister, even as she fears that India will be Sarah’s undoing. In researching the novel, Katy Yocom traveled to India, funded by a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. In 2019, she received an Al Smith Fellowship Award for artistic excellence from the Kentucky Arts Council.

Katy Yocom was born and raised in Atchison, Kansas. After earning a degree in journalism from the University of Kansas, she moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she has lived ever since. Her novel Three Ways to Disappear (Ashland Creek Press, 2019) won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and was named a Barnes & Noble Top Indie Favorite. She has also received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and served as writer-in-residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Crosshatch Hill House, and PLAYA. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Salon, LitHub, American Way (the American Airlines magazine), The Louisville Review, decomP magazinE, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University where she now serves as the Associate Director.

ADDITIONAL EVENT:
Katy Yocom — Craft Discussion: Writing in the Age of Extinction
Tuesday, March 10, 2 – 3 PM
Gallery, Memorial Union

Join us for an informal craft discussion with novelist, Katy Yocom.

Sheryl St. Germain — Songs for a Son: On Lyricism, Addiction, and Recovery
Tuesday, April 7
6 PM, Pioneer Room

Sheryl St. Germain is the author of several poetry collections including Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, The Journals of Scheherazade, Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, and The Small Door of Your Death. Her nonfiction books include Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman, Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair, and, most recently, Fifty Miles. A native of New Orleans, St. Germain has taught at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, Iowa State University, and Chatham University, where she served as Director of the MFA in Creative Writing for 14 years. She is the co-founder and director of the Words Without Walls Program. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay. In 2018, St. Germain was Louisiana Writer of the Year.

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Your One Wild & Precious Life — MFA Creative Writing & Environment Faculty Reading
Wednesday, April 22
7 PM, Pioneer Room

The MFA Faculty Spring 2020 reading takes its inspiration from the question posed in Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” which asks: “Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Join us for a spring celebration of the creative work of six faculty members from the English Department’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment. MFA faculty will share short excerpts from their in-progress and recently published fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.

K.L. Cook is the author of six award-winning books, including a novel, The Girl from Charnelle, and three collections of stories, Marrying Kind, Last Call, and Love Songs for the Quarantined. In 2019, Cook also published a poetry collection, Lost Soliloquies, and in 2020, a collection of essays on fiction, The Art of Disobedience. His work has received many prizes and honors, including the Willa Award for Best Contemporary Fiction, the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, an Editor’s Choice commendation from the Historical Novel Society, and a Southwest Book of the Year award. Cook’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared widely in journals and magazines, such as Glimmer Train, One Story, Harvard Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Poets & Writers, Brevity, Shenandoah,and American Short Fiction. His work has also been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and Best of the West, among others. He has been the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship and grant and residency fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center.

Andie Dominick has been an editorial writer at the Des Moines Register since 2001. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and Creative Writing from Iowa State University. She is the author of Needles: A Memoir of Growing Up with Diabetes, published by Simon and Schuster in the U.S. and translated into several languages. In 2014, Andie’s editorial writing brought her finalist honors for the Pulitzer Prize, and, in 2018, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. The Pulitzer board lauded her award-winning editorials for “examining in a clear, indignant voice, free of cliché or sentimentality, the damaging consequences for poor Iowa residents of privatizing the state’s administration of Medicaid.”

Christiana Louisa Langenberg is the author of the bilingual collection of stories Half of What I Know. Christiana’s second collection of stories, Here is What You’ll Do, was a finalist in the 2010 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is the recipient of the Drunken Boat Panliterary Award for Fiction, the Chelsea Award for Short Fiction, the Great River Writers’ Retreat, the Louisville Literary Arts Prose Prize and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. Her stories have been published in The Huffington Post, Passages North, Glimmer Train, Dogwood, New South, Lumina, Storyglossia, Drunken Boat, So To Speak, Literary Salt, Carve, Chelsea, Green Mountains Review, American Literary Review, and a variety of literary formats. In June 2013, as the David R. Collins invited speaker, she delivered a keynote address, “Between Word Greed and Abandonment: Learning to Love the Process,” at the Midwest Writing Center conference. In 2014, Passages North included her award-winning lyric essay “Foiled,” a braided narrative about the tragic death of a Vietnamese immigrant and the complexities of raising a child with multiple disabilities.

Debra Marquart is the author of six books including Small Buried Things: Poems and The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. She has received numerous grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Nonfiction Award, the Wachtmeister Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Normal Poetry Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award. Her short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws in her experiences as a road musician, was awarded the Headwaters Prize and her poetry collection, From Sweetness, won the Pearl Poetry Award. Marquart’s first poetry collection, Everything’s a Verb, was awarded the Minnesota Voices Award. Marquart’s work has been featured on the BBC, and on three NPR programs—Morning Edition, Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and Tom Ashbrook’s On Point. In 2016, her environmental poem, “Lament,” was selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry. Marquart serves as the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. In 2019, she was appointed as the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa. Marquart’s latest poetry collection, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems is forthcoming from New Rives Press in 2021.

Charissa Menefee is a playwright, poet, and director. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, When I Stopped Counting and It Rains in My Sun Room. Her poetry and plays have been published or are forthcoming in journals, including Adanna, Poetry South, Terrene, Poets Reading the News, Some Scripts, Plainsongs, Pirene’s Fountain, The Wild Word, Twyckenham Notes, and Dragon Poet Review, and anthologized in The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry & Medicine, 105 Five-Minute Plays for Study and Performance, Surprised by Joy, The Poeming Pigeon: In the News, and Telepoem Booth: Missed Calls and Other Poetry. Menefee has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Playwriting at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a writer-in-residence at the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts and the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s New American Playwrights Project. Her plays have recently been seen at the Philadelphia Women’s Theatre Festival, The Underground, Rover Dramawerks, Theatre Lawrence, Lakewood Playhouse, The Factory Theatre, Phoenix Theatre, Theatre Unbound, The EcoTheatre Lab, and The Playwrights’ Center’s Ubu Roi Bake-Off.

David Zimmerman is a fiction writer, novelist, and script writer. He is the author of a novella, Socket, published by Anvil Press, and two novels published by Soho Press—The Sandbox, published in 2010, and Caring is Creepy, published in 2012. Zimmerman has worked as a publicist at St. Martin’s Press in NYC and taught writing at Georgia Southern University, Dilla University College in Ethiopia, South College in Savannah and the University of Wisconsin, where he was a fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing.

Monday, September 17, 2018

Latina Memories: A Chilean Human Rights Perspective

Marjorie Agosín
Monday, September 17, 2018
7:00 pm, Sun Room, Memorial Union

Marjorie Agosín is an author, poet, and human rights activist known for her outspokenness for women’s rights in Chile. Agosín was raised in Chile by Jewish parents, and her writings demonstrate a unique blending of Jewish and South American cultures. Her family moved to the United States to escape the horrors of the Pinochet takeover. Both her scholarship and her creative work focus on social justice, feminism, and remembrance. Agosín’s many awards include the Pura Belpré Award for I Lived on Butterfly Hill; the Letras de Oro Prize for her poetry, and a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights. She is currently a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.

Marjorie Agosín has written or edited more than eighty books. Her collections include The Angel of Memory (2001), The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (2000), Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of my Chilean Jewish Father (1998), An Absence of Shadows (1998), Melodious Women (1997), Starry Night: Poems (1996), and A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (1995). The Chilean government has honored Marjorie Agosín with a Gabriela Mistral Medal for Lifetime Achievement.

December 2, 2018

Man Cave: A One-Man Sci-Fi Climate Change Tragicomedy
Timothy Mooney, Playwright/Actor
Sunday, December 2, 2018, 7:30 pm
308 Carver Hall

MAN CAVE finds the “last man on earth” (coincidentally, “Tim”) burrowed into what is essentially a Hobbit home, somewhere in Canada, broadcasting into a microphone for whomever might yet be out there. Realizing that perhaps there may not be anyone still listening, Tim turns his attention to warning whatever far corners of the universe may still be out there receiving radio waves.

Timothy Mooney, author of the acting textbook, Acting at the Speed of Life; Conquering Theatrical Style, and The Big Book of Molière Monologues, has given thousands of students their first introduction to Molière through his one-man play, Molière Than Thou. Mr. Mooney is the former founder and editor of The Script Review and was the Artistic Director of Chicago’s Stage Two Theatre, where he produced nearly fifty plays in five years. When Stage Two needed a new Tartuffe, Mr. Mooney found himself taking on the hilarious world of Molière, eventually writing seventeen hilarious rhymed variations of Molière’s plays with an impish sense of rhyme (most published by Playscripts, Inc. and Stage Rights). These plays have been produced and celebrated around the world, with high school productions of Mooney’s Misanthrope, Miser, Imaginary Invalid, and Tartuffe going on to state finals in Massachusetts, Texas, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama, while his Doctor in Spite of Himself took third place in the Scottish Community Drama Association National Festival. Tim, now operating as the not-for-profit “Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre,” continues to present Molière across North America, along with Lot o’ Shakespeare, The Greatest Speech of All Time, Ten Epic Plays at a Breakneck Pace , Breakneck Hamlet, and Breakneck Julius Caesar. Tim also teaches classical performance and performs his one-man sci-fi thriller, Criteria, and his new climate change tragicomedy, Man Cave.

Sunday, January 27, 2019

MFA Program Home Voices Festival
Ames Public Library, Farwell T. Brown Auditorium
Sunday, January 27, 2019, 2:00 – 5:00 pm

Join us for a celebration of the accomplishments of alumni of Iowa State University’s Creative Writing and Environment MFA program and MA Program in English (Creative Writing), including readings and a panel discussion, along with readings by special guests, current MFA students, Crystal Stone and Eric Fisher Stone.

Colin Rafferty is the author of Hallow This Ground, a collection of essays on monuments and memorials published in 2016 by Break Away Books/Indiana University Press. His essays have appeared in Utne Reader, Bellingham Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and many more. He’s a graduate of Kansas State University (BA), Iowa State University (MA in English-Creative Writing) and the University of Alabama (MFA). Rafferty teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia where he is an Associate Professor of English. Currently, he is at work on a variety of projects, including an essay collection about the presidents of the United States, a series of audio essays utilizing public domain recordings, and a book about the Vietnam War and American memory. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Wade, and their dog.

Marissa Landrigan is the author of The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat (Greystone Books, 2017), a memoir chronicling her journey from vegetarian to ethical omnivore. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals, including The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, Guernica, Orion, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Diagram, South Loop Review, and others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University and is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, where she teaches creative, digital, and professional writing. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, daughter, and their dog.

John Linstrom grew up in South Haven, Michigan, the hometown of the great Progressive Era horticulturist and New Agrarian philosopher Liberty Hyde Bailey. Linstrom began researching Bailey’s life and work while a student in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. After graduation, Linstrom served as Executive Director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, and, in 2015, Counterpoint Press published his centennial edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s ecological manifesto, The Holy Earth, with a new foreword by Wendell Berry. Linstrom’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Commonweal Magazine, Bridge Eight, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Dunes Review, and Narrative Northeast’s “Eco Issue,” and Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. Linstrom is now co-editor with his former Bailey Museum colleague John Stempien of a collection of Bailey’s garden writings, tentatively titled Marvels at our Feet: A Gardener’s Companion, forthcoming from Cornell University Press in fall of 2019. He currently lives with his fiancée in Brooklyn, where he is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University and a member of the Space Poets collective.

Eric Fisher Stone is a third year MFA candidate at Iowa State University. He belongs to Fort Worth, Texas where he completed his undergraduate degree at Texas Christian University. His poems have appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, The Lyric, Yellow Chair Review, Jersey Devil Press, Turtle Island Quarterly, and Uppagus, among several others. His first full length poetry collection, The Providence of Grass, was published in 2018 by Chatter House Press.

Crystal Stone graduated from Allegheny College with a BA in English January 2015. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and gave a TEDx talk called “The Transformational Power of Poetry” in April 2018. She currently serves as poetry editor at Flyway: Journal of Environmental Writing. Her poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Anomaly Literary Journal, Writers Resist, Drunk Monkeys, Coldnoon, Poets Reading the News, Jet Fuel Review, Southword Journal Online and others. Her first poetry collection, Knock-Off Monarch was published in December, 2018 by Dawn Valley Press.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
David Montgomery
Thursday, March 28, 2019, 7:00 pm, Great Hall, Memorial Union

David R. Montgomery, author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is a professor at the University of Washington, where he studies the evolution of topography and how geological processes shape landscapes and influence ecological systems. He will speak about his most recent book, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, and make a case for how agriculture can be the solution to global environmental problems. The book draws on his experiences visiting farms around the world as a MacArthur Fellow and explores practices that help restore soil health and fertility. Montgomery is the author of several other books, including The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life, co-written with Anne Biklé. Pesek Colloquium on Sustainable Agriculture

David Montgomery studied geology at Stanford University before earning his Ph.D. in geomorphology at the University of California, Berkeley. His other books include King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon and the The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood.

Monday, April 8, 2019

Epic, Funny, Sad, Strange, True: The Stories We Tell and Why We
Tell Them – Kira Obolensky
Monday, April 8, 2019, 8:00 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

In this lecture, Kira Obolensky will talk about her work as a playwright-in-residence with the award-winning Ten Thousand Things. Over the course of ten years, Kira has written a body of work that has been successfully performed for audiences in prisons, shelters, low-income centers, immigrant training centers, community centers, and rural Minnesota, as well as for a theatre-savvy audience in the Twin Cities. She’ll discuss her discoveries and share some techniques for thinking about stories as a way to engage collective imaginations.

Kira Obolensky is currently a Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence with Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning theatre company based in Minneapolis. She has co-created and written seven plays for TTT, which have performed for audiences in prisons, shelters, teen pregnancy programs, community centers in rural and urban areas, low income senior centers, psychiatric wards, immigrant and adult education programs, chemical dependency centers, as well as to paying audiences in the Twin Cities. Recent non-TTT productions include Stewardess (History Theater), Why We Laugh: A Terezin Cabaret (international festivals in Prague and Terezin, Fortune’s Fool in Minneapolis), and Cabinet of Wonders (Gas and Electric Arts, Open Eye Figure Theatre). Kira is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Kesselring Prize and the Jerome Foundation grant. She attended Juilliard’s Playwriting Program and is a core writer at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. Kira teaches playwriting at the University of Minnesota and is on the faculty of Spalding University’s Low-Residency MFA in Writing Program.

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Renewing Reciprocity: Indigenous Food Systems and the Honorable Harvest
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Wednesday, April 17, 2019, 7:00 pm
Sun Room, Memorial Union

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant scientist, writer, professor, mother and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of two award-winning books, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Kimmerer will discuss the philosophy of reciprocal relationships in indigenous food systems and how the practice of the Honorable Harvest can serve as a model for sustainable agriculture. She is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the State University of New York in Syracuse and the founder and director of SUNY’s Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Sustainable Agriculture Symposium Keynote.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

The Art of Fiction
A Reading & Conversation with Margot Livesey
Thursday, April 25, 2019, 7:00 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Margot Livesey is the award-winning author of ten books, including a collection of stories, Learning by Heart, and eight acclaimed novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and Mercury, which was named a Best Book of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews and Barnes & Noble. Her most recent book is a collection of essays on the art of writing, The Hidden Machinery. Margot Livesey grew up in a boys’ private school in the Scottish Highlands, where her father taught and her mother was the school nurse. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writers Series

Thursday, April 25, 2019

AFTERNOON CRAFT TALK
The Hidden Machinery: The Art of Writing, Margot Livesey
Thursday, April 25, 2019, 2:10 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Join us for an informal moderated craft talk. Writers will have the opportunity to ask questions and hear Margot Livesey discuss her own writing process.

THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING SPONSORS WHO MADE THIS SERIES POSSIBLE:
Pearl Hogrefe Fund
MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
Department of English
Lectures Program
ISU Writer’s Guild
Ames Public Library

The Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series events listed below are sponsored by the Pearl Hogrefe Fund, the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment, and the Department of English.

Each year, Iowa State University hosts dozens of environmental writers, scientists, and artists for public lectures. A selected list of speaker series events during 2017-2018 that will be of interest to creative writers is also listed below. For a complete listing of all public lectures at ISU, visit the Committee on Lectures website: http://www.lectures.iastate.edu/

Monday, September 18, 2017

Medical Apartheid: The History of Experimentation on Black Americans
Harriet Washington
Monday, September 18, 2017
Great Hall/South Ballroom/Oak Room

Harriet Washington is the author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award, a PEN award, and Gustavus Myers Award. The book has been described as “the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans.” She has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She focuses mainly upon bioethics, history of medicine, African American health issues and the intersection of medicine, ethics and culture, and is the first social history of medical research with African Americans. The book Her newest book, Infectious Madness, Washington looks at the connection between germs and mental illness. As a journalist and editor, she has worked for USA Today and several other publications, been a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and has written for such academic forums as the Harvard Public Health Review and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

The Artist in the World: Poetry & Playwriting
Heather Derr-Smith & Charissa Menefee
Sunday, February 18, 2018, at 2:00 pm
Campanile Room, Memorial Union

THIS EVENTS HAS BEEN POSTPONED! CHECK BACK FOR FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS.

Heather Derr-Smith is the author of four books of poetry including The Bride Minaret, Tongue Screw, and Thrust, which was published in 2017 and awarded the Lexi Rudnitsky Editors’ Prize. She’s a graduate of the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she lives in Des Moines, Iowa. Derr-Smith’s work addresses issues of social justice and slow violence. Her first collection, Each End of the World, documents experiences she had while working in a refugee camp in Gašinci, Croatia in 1994, during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In The Bride Minaret, she contemplates personal and global issues of exile and identity. The poems were written in Damascus, Syria, where Derr-Smith interviewed Iraqi and Palestinian refugees during the Iraq war troop surge of 2007.

Charissa Menefee is a playwright, poet, and director. Her historical play, The Figurehead, about the final days of England’s James I, was developed by the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s New American Playwrights Project and was a finalist for the Julie Harris Playwright Award. How Long is Fifteen Minutes?, which considers the effects of sudden fame on ordinary women, was supported by a grant from Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities and featured in Tennessee Women’s Theatre Project’s annual festival; the play’s anchoring monologue, Recognize Me, is currently in production as a short >film, directed by Menefee. Our Antigone, adapted from the Sophocles classic, was commissioned by Iowa’s Story Theatre Company and premiered in the spring of 2017. Her work can also be found in Smith & Kraus’ 105 Five-Minute Plays for Study and Performance. Menefee’s poetry chapbook, When I Stopped Counting, is available from Finishing Line Press, and her poetry has been published in Adanna, Terrene, Poetry South, The Paddock Review, Poets Reading the News, Amygdala, Twyckenham Notes, and Telepoem Booths. Menefee has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and she is a 2018 Writer-in-Residence at Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts. She teaches scriptwriting, dramatic literature, and performance at Iowa State University.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Food Security
Winona LaDuke
Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 7:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) is founder and Co-Director of Honor the Earth, a national advocacy group encouraging public support and funding for native environmental groups, working nationally and internationally on climate change, renewable energy, sustainable development, food systems and environmental justice. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities with advanced degrees in rural economic development, LaDuke has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. In her own community in northern Minnesota, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non-profit organizations in the country, and a leader on culturally-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. In this work, LaDuke also works to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.

In addition to numerous articles, LaDuke is the author of a number of non-fiction titles including All Our Relations, The Winona LaDuke Reader, Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming, Food is Medicine: Recovering Traditional Foods to Heal the People, The Militarization of Indian Country, and her most recent The Winona Laduke Chronicles: Stories from the Front Lines in the Battle for Environmental Justice. She has also penned a work of fiction, Last Standing Woman, and a children’s book, In the Sugarbush.
Other honors include the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Thomas Merton Award, the Ann Bancroft Award, the Global Green Award, and the International Slow Food Award for working to protect wild rice and local biodiversity. LaDuke also served as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections.

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Bad Feminist
Roxane Gay
Thursday, April 5 2018 at 8:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

Roxane Gay is an author and cultural critic whose collection of essays Bad Feminist is considered the quintessential exploration of modern feminism. In her most recent book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay reflects on her struggles with weight, trauma, and self-image. Her other books include the novel An Untamed State and a collection of short stories, Difficult Women. She recently became the first black woman to ever write for Marvel, with the comic series World of Wakanda. Gay is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, was the coeditor of PANK, and was the nonfiction editor at The Rumpus. She teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University.

Telling Necessary Stories: Q & A on the Craft of Writing with Roxane Gay
Thursday, April 5, 2018 at 4:00 – 5:00 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

“When I write, I want to tell necessary stories, whether I am writing fiction or nonfiction. I want to make readers think and feel intensely. It’s not up to me as a writer to tell readers why they should care. We all come to reading in different ways for different reasons. I can only hope that more often than not, I am putting something meaningful on the page.”

—Roxane Gay, Kore Press, “An Interview with Roxane Gay”

In this informal moderated craft talk, writers will have the opportunity to ask questions and hear Roxane Gay discuss her own writing process.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Writing Science Fiction Thrillers in the Age of Climate Change

Paolo Bacigalupi
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 7:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

Paolo Bacigalupi is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer and author of several popular dystopian novels for young adults, including Ship Breaker and, most recently, Tool of War. His debut novel, The Windup Girl, received Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named one of the ten best novels of 2009 by Time Magazine. A work of environmental science fiction, it explores the unintended effects of bioengineering and a future world in which fossil fuels are no longer viable. Bacigalupi’s latest novel for adults, The Water Knife, is a near-future thriller about climate change and drought in the southwestern United States.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s work has appeared in WIRED, Slate, Salon.com, High Country News, OnEarth Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. His debut young adult novel, Ship Breaker, was a National Book Award finalist, and its sequel, The Drowned Cities, received Kirkus Review’s Best of YA Book Award in 2012. His short fiction been nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year. It is collected in Pump Six and Other Stories, a Locus Award winner for Best Collection and also a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.

Writing Brave: Q & A on the Craft of Writing with Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi
Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 2:10-3:00 pm
Gallery, Memorial Union

“One thing stands out to me: I like writers. I like those people who struggle to say something with fiction. Those people who struggle to shape an idea, or a character or a scene, struggle to get a voice and hold on to it through the whole of a long project. I like those people who do not gaggle about with theoretical abstractions of what a book should be, or could be, or might be, but instead dare to face the thing that they actually can create, and that will never come close to the platonic ideal of whatever some outsider will say is good. I like the people who dare the messy complexity of hundreds of thousands of words, tangled, all connected, all influenced by one another, lace webworks, painstakingly and messily constructed. Those webs of story might shake in the wind, and might come apart when people prod them, might barely manage to cling to a shape, but I love them for their bravery.”

—Paulo Bacigalupi, “A Thought About Writers”

In this informal moderated craft talk, writers will have the opportunity to ask questions and hear Paolo Bacigalupi discuss his own writing process.

The Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series events listed below are sponsored by the Pearl Hogrefe Fund, the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment, and the Department of English.

Each year, Iowa State University hosts dozens of environmental writers, scientists, and artists for public lectures. A selected list of speaker series events during 2016-2017 that will be of interest to creative writers is also listed below. For a complete listing of all public lectures at ISU, visit the Committee on Lectures website: http://www.lectures.iastate.edu/

Thursday, September 15, 2016

A Wild Life

Cheryl Strayed
Thursday, 15 Sep 2016 at 7:00 pm
Stephens Auditorium

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. The book and 2014 movie adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon recounts how at age 22, shattered by her mother’s death and the end of her young marriage, Strayed decides to confront her emotional pain by trekking more than 1,000 miles from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington border. Now in her forties, Strayed is the cohost with Steve Almond of Dear Sugar Radio, an advice podcast for the lost, lonely and heartsick produced by WBUR Radio. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University. Her other books include the advice essay collection Tiny Beautiful Things and the novel Torch. She is also a regular columnist for the New York Time Book Review.
In her memoir Wild Cheryl Strayed describes the sometimes harrowing, other times hilarious stories behind her solo wilderness trek on the Pacific Crest Trail and the personal journey that led her there. In this talk, Strayed will discuss what she learned about how we bear the unbearable, how we move from grief and anger to acceptance, and how we keep walking even when it seems impossible to stand.
Photo credit: Joni Kabana

Cosponsored By:

Ames Public Library Friends Foundation
Humanities Iowa
MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series
University Library
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Which Future? Fiction and the Everything Change

Margaret Atwood
Tuesday, 01 Nov 2016 at 8:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.” – Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is an author, poet and environmental activist whose work is widely known for its commentary on the human condition and female experience. Her more than forty books include The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, and The Heart Goes Last. Her MaddAddam trilogy, which began with the Oryx and Crake, is currently being adapted into an HBO series. Her forthcoming book, Hag-Seed, is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Atwood’s many international literary awards include the prestigious Booker Prize for contemporary fiction, Arthur C. Clarke Award in science fiction and the Governor General’s Award for fiction in her native Canada. Atwood’s critical acclaim is equally matched by her popularity among readers and following on Twitter.
Margaret Atwood on Twitter

Cosponsored By:

Ames Public Library Friends Foundation
Humanities Iowa
MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
Office of Sustainability
Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series
The Green Umbrella
University Library
World Affairs
Writers’ Guild
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

My Life on the Road

Gloria Steinem
Tuesday, 11 Oct 2016 at 7:00 pm
Stephens Auditorium, Iowa State Center

No tickets – General admission seating – Doors open at 6:30
Gloria Steinem is a feminist icon, social activist, writer, editor, and champion of women’s rights. She co-founded Ms. magazine, serving as an editor for fifteen years, and helped co-found New York magazine. The National Women’s Political Caucus is among the many groups she helped found, and her books include the collection of essays Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Revolution from Within, Moving Beyond Words and her memoir, My Life on the Road, detailing her more than thirty years as a feminist organizer.
Gloria Steinem travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. She now lives in New York City and has just finished a book detailing her more than thirty years on the road as a feminist organizer.
She continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., and was instrumental in the magazine’s move to join and be published by the Feminist Majority Foundation. As a freelance writer, she was published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and women’s magazines as well as for publications in other countries. She has produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, a feature film about the death penalty for Lifetime, and been the subject of profiles on Lifetime and Showtime.
Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin’s The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History.

Cosponsored By:

Ames Public Library Friends Foundation
Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women & Politics
Margaret Sloss Women’s Center
National Affairs
Society for the Advancement of Gender Equity
University Library
Women’s & Gender Studies
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Thursday, March 23, 2017

(Un)Natural Histories: From Fantasy to Historical Fiction — A Reading

DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM & BENJAMIN PERCY
Thursday, March 23
Sun Room, Memorial Union — 8 PM

From Fantasy to Historical Fiction: Two Novelists on Craft

Sun Room, Memorial Union — 2 – 3:30
David Anthony Durham is the author of seven novels: The Risen, The Sacred Band, The Other Lands, Acacia (John W Campbell Award Winner, Finalist for the Prix Imaginales), Pride of Carthage (Finalist for the Legacy Award), Walk Through Darkness (NY Times Notable Book) and Gabriel’s Story (NY Times Notable Book, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Winner). His writing ranges from literary novels of the African-American experience, to historical fiction set in the ancient world, to fantasy and science fiction. His novels have been published in French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. He writes for the Wild Cards series of collaborative novels, edited by George RR Martin, with stories appearing in Fort Freak, Lowball, High Stakes and forthcoming in Texas Hold ‘Em. Other short fiction has been anthologized in Unbound, Unfettered, It’s All Love, and in Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing. Four of his novels have been optioned for development as feature films. He teaches fiction in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. http://www.davidanthonydurham.com/

Benjamin Percy is the author of three novels, most recent among them The Dead Lands (Grand Central/Hachette), a post-apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga. He is also the author of Red Moon (Grand Central/Hachette) and The Wilding (Graywolf Press), as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf Press) and The Language of Elk (Grand Central/Hachette). His craft book — Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction — was published by Graywolf Press in 2016, and his new novel, The Dark Net, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017.

Percy’s fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, GQ, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and Tin House. He also writes the Green Arrow and Teen Titans series at DC Comics. His honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Writers’ Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the Plimpton Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics. He is a member of the WGA screenwriters’ guild and has sold scripts to FOX and Starz. He currently has several film and TV projects in development. Percy has taught at several colleges and universities, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. http://benjaminpercy.com/

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Eco-Theatre: The Intersection of Art, Politics, and Environmental Science Activists – A Playwright’s Talk

PAULA CIZMAR
Tuesday, April 4
South Ballroom, Memorial Union — 8 PM

Paula Cizmar is a playwright whose work often combines poetry with politics and is concerned with the way stories get told in a culture—and with who or what gets left out of the discussion. Her work has been produced at Portland Stage Company, the Women’s Project, the Jungle Theatre (Minneapolis), San Diego Rep, and Playwrights Arena @ LATC, among others. New plays include Antigone X, which opened in February 2017 at the USC MFA Rep, and January, which was workshopped in New York in 2016 as part of the New Play Development Series at MultiStages Theatre, directed by Lorca Peress; another of her new plays, The Last Nights of Scheherazade, is the recipient of the 2016 Israel Baran Award at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum. Her environmental plays include Strawberry, presented as a reading at Tactical Reads at Atwater Village Theatre, and The Chisera, selected for the 2016 Mach 33 Festival of New Plays, and performed in a workshop production at Cosumnes River College, directed by Cheri Fortin. Among Paula’s many awards are an NEA grant, a Drama-Logue Award, and a TCG/Mellon On the Road grant. She has received commissions from numerous theatres including Center Theatre Group, Salt Lake Acting Company, Echo Theatre, Portland Stage Company, and Playwrights Arena. She is one of the authors of Seven, the documentary theatre piece about human rights defenders which has been translated into 20+ languages and has been performed in 32 countries. Paula is also one of seven women commissioned to write The Hotel Play, a site-specific work marking the 25th anniversary of Playwrights Arena, a theatre that was formed during the civil uprising in Los Angeles following the verdict in the Rodney King beating case of 1992. The play asks: Have we made any progress in race relations? Are we better off now? The play runs through April 2017. Paula is an Associate Professor of Theatre in Playwriting at the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts. More information: www.paulacizmar.com

Friday, April 21, 2017

MFA PROGRAM “HOME VOICES” ALUMNI FESTIVAL

Readings, a catered reception, and book publication celebration for four MFA and MA program alumni.
Friday, April 21
Ames Public Library, 515 Douglas Avenue
Readings & Catered Reception — 5 PM – 8 PM

Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014). She holds an MFA in Poetry and a graduate certificate in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University, and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Iowa State University. Alleyne’s fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and poetry have been widely published in journals and anthologies such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Guernica, The Caribbean Writer, Black Arts Quarterly, The Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gathering Ground, and Growing Up Girl, among others. Her work has earned several honors and awards, most recently the Picador Guest Professorship in Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany, a 2014 Iowa Arts Council Fellowship, and first place in the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Contest. Alleyne is a Cave Canem graduate, and is originally from Trinidad and Tobago. She currently works at James Madison University as Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and an Associate Professor of English. http://www.laurenkalleyne.com/bio.html

Lindsay Tigue is the author of System of Ghosts, which was the winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2016. She writes poetry and fiction and her work appears in Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, Rattle, diode, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other journals. She was a Tennessee Williams scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a James Merrill fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, and a former graduate assistant at the Georgia Review. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and is a current Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. She is originally from Michigan and now lives in Athens, Georgia. https://lindsaytigue.wordpress.com/about/

Melissa L. Sevigny grew up in Tucson, Arizona where she fell in love with the Sonoran Desert’s ecology, geology and dark desert skies. Her lyrical nonfiction and poetry explores the intersections of science, politics, and history, with a focus on the American Southwest. Sevigny is the author of two nonfiction books, Mythical River: Chasing the mirage of new water in the American Southwest (University of Iowa Press, 2016) and Under Desert Skies: How Tucson mapped the way to the moon and planets (University of Arizona Press, 2016). She earned a B.S. in Environmental Science & Policy from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. She has worked as a science communicator in the fields of water policy, sustainable agriculture, and planetary scienceShe is currently the Science & Technology Reporter for KNAU (Arizona Public Radio) in Flagstaff, Arizona. https://melissasevigny.com/about/

Lucas Southworth grew up in Oak Park, IL and has studied writing at Knox College, Iowa State University and the University of Alabama, where he received his MFA. His stories can be found online and in print from Conjunctions, Mid-American Review, Willow Springs, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and others. He is an assistant professor in writing at Loyola University Maryland, where he
specializes in teaching screenwriting and fiction. He serves as an editor at Slash Pine Press and at the Baltimore Review.

http://everyoneherehasagun.blogspot.com/

THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING SPONSORS WHO MADE THIS SERIES POSSIBLE:

Humanities Iowa
Pearl Hogrefe Fund
MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
Department of English
Lectures Program
ISU Writer’s Guild
Ames Public Library

The Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series events listed below are sponsored by the Pearl Hogrefe Fund, the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment, and the Department of English.

Each year, Iowa State University hosts dozens of environmental writers, scientists, and artists for public lectures. A selected list of speaker series events during 2015-2016 that will be of interest to creative writers is also listed below. For a complete listing of all public lectures at ISU, visit the Committee on Lectures website: http://www.lectures.iastate.edu/

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Sex Trafficking in the USA

Documentary & Discussion
Tuesday, 08 Sep 2015 at 7:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union
“Sex Trafficking in the USA” is the first episode of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new documentary, A Path Appears. The Department of Justice estimates that there are 300,000 children at risk of being trafficked into sexual slavery in the United States. Reporters Kristof and WuDunn introduce us to the complex circumstances behind these shocking numbers and some of the survivors. They also document growing efforts to reshape law enforcement’s response to prostitution and trafficking and the work of anti-trafficking organizations. National Affairs Series: When American Values Are in Conflict
George Belitsos, Retired Youth & Shelter Services CEO, will provide opening remarks. Following the 84-minute film, Teresa Downing-Matibag, executive director of the Network Against Human Trafficking and a lecturer of sociology at Iowa State, will lead a discussion. Participants include Ruth Buckels, the mother of a human trafficking survivor, and Mike Ferjak, who leads the Iowa Department of Justice Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

A Path Appears, is a follow-up to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s groundbreaking series Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The film features such advocates as Malin Akerman, Mia Farrow, Jennifer Garner, Blake Lively, Eva Longoria as they travel to Colombia, Haiti, Kenya, and throughout the United States uncovering the harshest forms of gender-based oppression and human rights violations, as well as the effective solutions being implemented to combat them.
In Sex Trafficking in the USA we meet Shana, who was first sold to a pimp by her mother at the age of 12; Maria, a mother who discovers her 15-year-old daughter being sold through backpage.com; and Savannah, who was stalked by an older man and then sold and held in sexual bondage.

Cosponsored By:
Central Iowa Service Network
Iowa Network Against Human Trafficking
National Affairs
Rotary Club of Ames
Student Network Against Human Trafficking
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Monday, September 21, 2015

Catch Me If You Can

Frank Abagnale
Monday, 21 Sep 2015 at 8:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union
Frank Abagnale, a former con artist whose crimes inspired the memoir and movie Catch Me If You Can, is one of the world’s most respected authorities on forgery, embezzlement, and secure documents. Following his five-year prison term, he was released after agreeing to help the FBI as an expert on fraud, going from a successful con artist to one of the world’s top authorities on fraud prevention, and discussing the latest safeguards to protect organizations from fraud, identity theft and other cybercrimes. His security programs are used by more than 14,000 institutions worldwide. Greater Iowa Credit Union Business Lecture Series

Cosponsored By:
College of Business
Greater Iowa Credit Union
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Friday, October 2, 2015

A New Chapter in the Living Legacy of George Washington Carver

Xavier Cavazos
Friday, 02 Oct 2015 at 8:00 pm – Brunnier Art Museum, Scheman Building, Iowa State Center
Xavier Cavazos, a 2013 graduate of Iowa State’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Environment, will read from his new book of poetry, Diamond Grove Slave Tree. The collection is a product of Cavazos’s time at Iowa State and inspired by stories of the life and times of one of the university’s most distinguished alums, George Washington Carver. Diamond Grove Slave Tree won the inaugural Prairie Seed Poetry Prize from Ice Cube Press.
Cavazos is also the author of Barbarian at the Gate and served as poetry editor for Flyway: Journal of Creative Writing and the Environment. He currently teaches in the Central Washington Writing Project, Africana and Black Studies, and the Professional and Creative Writing Programs at Central Washington University.
Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series Event
Book signing and reception to follow

Cosponsored By:
MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
Pearl Hogrefe Fund
University Museums
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Monday, October 19, 2015

Gut Churn

Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad
Monday, 19 Oct 2015 at 7:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union
Free event | No tickets needed | Doors open at 6:15
Jad Abumrad is producer and co-host of Radiolab, a show about curiosity where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Radiolab, heard weekly on NPR, is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to enhance public understanding of science and technology. Topics have ranged from how Charles Darwin’s 150-year-old discoveries about human emotion are helping Facebook users; details of the world’s longest running experiment; an examination of one proposal to communicate with the dead; and a discussion of whether photos in this Digital Age cause us to forget. This lecture is the personal story of how Abumrad, a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and the son of a doctor and scientist, invented a new aesthetic and how those negative feelings we have during the creative process – gut churn – can propel us forward.

Jad Abumrad did most of his growing up in Tennessee, before studying creative writing and music composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. Following graduation, Abumrad wrote music for films, and reported and produced documentaries for a variety of local and national public radio programs, including On The Media, Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, Morning Edition, All Things Considered and WNYC’s “24 Hours at the Edge of Ground Zero.”

While working on staff at WNYC, Abumrad began tinkering with an idea for a new kind of radio program. That idea evolved into one of public radio’s most popular shows today – Radiolab. Abumrad hosts the program with Robert Krulwich and also serves as one of its producers. The program won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award and explores big questions in science, philosophy and mankind. Under Abumrad’s direction, the show uses a combination of deep-dive journalism, narrative storytelling, dialogue and music to craft compositions of exploration and discovery. Radiolab podcasts are downloaded over 4 million times each month and the program is carried on 437 stations across the nation.

Cosponsored By:
College of Design
College of Engineering
Engineers’ Week
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Friday, October 23, 2015

Intersections of Identity: A Spoken Word Performance

Kai Davis
Friday, 23 Oct 2015 at 7:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union
Kai Davis is a writer and performer from Philadelphia whose work deals with race, gender and sexuality. A Queer Woman of Color, she explores how these concepts affect who we are and how we love. In 2011 Davis was awarded the title of National Brave New Voices Grand Slam Champion, and in 2012 she was the second-ranked Youth Speaks Individual Slam Poet in the nation. Her work has been featured at the San Francisco Opera House, the Kimmel Center, the Temple Performing Arts Center, and on CNN. Davis is the artistic director of the Babel Poetry Collective. She is also a Creative Writing and African American Studies student at Temple University.
Watch her performance videos online at kaidavispoetry.com

Cosponsored By:
Asian Pacific American Awareness Coalition
Black Student Alliance
Division of Student Affairs – Student Event Fund
Lambda Theta Alpha
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Racing Extinction

Discussion with Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos
Tuesday, 27 Oct 2015 at 8:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union
Louie Psihoyos won an Academy Award for his documentary The Cove, and his new documentary, Racing Extinction, premiered at Sundance in 2015. Psihoyos is widely regarded as one of the world’s most prominent still photographers. He has circled the globe for National Geographic and shot hundreds of covers for other magazines, including Fortune Magazine, Smithsonian, Time and Sports Illustrated. He is also the founder and executive director of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), a non-profit organization that creates film, photography and media inspiring people to save the oceans. In Racing Extinction, Psihoyos joins forces with activists, scientists, nature photographers and cutting-edge inventors to draw attention to the dangers we face. While covert operations reveal the horrific black-market trade in endangered aquatic species, the film’s broader lens uncovers the even more disastrous consequences of human activity. Part of the World Affairs Series: Redefining Global Security

Cosponsored By:
Office of Sustainability
The Green Umbrella
World Affairs
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Monday, November 9, 2015

The Plight of Homeless LGBTQ+ Youth

Ryan Berg
Monday, 09 Nov 2015 at 8:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union
Ryan Berg, author of No House to Call My Home: Love, Family, & Other Transgressions, will talk about his work in New York City as a counselor with LGBTQ teenagers in foster care, especially those who are about to age out of the child welfare system. Berg begins this account of LGBTQ teens in the NYC foster care system with statistics that are at once shocking and painfully familiar: Children placed in foster care are more likely than veterans of war to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. LGBTQ teens make up 40% of homeless youth and are especially vulnerable. 70% of LGBTQ youth in group homes reported violence based on LGBTQ status. Berg is a West Des Moines native and Valley High School graduate now living in Minneapolis.
A panel discussion with Ryan Berg will follow. Participants include Donna Red Wing of One Iowa, Penny McGee of Iowa Kids Net, and Julia Webb of Youth & Shelter Services. The panel will speak to the needs and problems in Iowa with special emphasis on the search for LGBTQ-affirming family foster and adoptive homes.

Cosponsored By:
AFFIRM
Achieving Maximum Potential
Ames PFLAG
Ames Public Library
LGBT Student Services
LGBTA Alliance
LGBTQ+ Youth Best Practice Committee
One Iowa
Youth & Shelter Services
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Tuesday, November 15, 2015

Poems of Environmental & Social Justice

Jane Satterfield & Ned Balbo
Tuesday, 10 Nov 2015 at 7:00 pm
Campanile Room, Memorial Union

From their unique perspectives, poets Jane Satterfield and Ned Balbo engage personal and public history through an awareness of the challenges that shape our contemporary moment.
Jane Satterfield is the author of four books, including Daughters of Empire: a Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond, and Her Familiars, a collection of poetry. Satterfield’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, the Florida Review Editors’ Prize, the Mslexia women’s poetry prize, and the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Prize. Satterfield is also the author of Shepherdess with an Automatic and Assignation at Vanishing Point. She is the recipient of three Maryland Arts Council grants and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has been awarded the Pirate’s Alley Gold Medal in the Essay from the Faulkner Society, the Heekin Foundation’s Cuchulain Prize for Rhetoric in the Essay, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Notre Dame Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Antioch Review, The Journal, Bellingham Review, and Elixir. She has served as the literary editor for the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, and she is an associate professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.
Ned Balbo is the author of three books including, most recently, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, which was awarded the 2010 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poets’ Prize. Balbo currently teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University; his honors include the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and three Maryland Arts Council grants. Balbo is also the author of Lives of the Sleepers, which received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and a ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Galileo’s Banquet was awarded the Towson University Prize. Balbo has received three Maryland Arts Council grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and has been a poetry fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work has been published in numerous journals including Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Dark Horse, Dogwood, The Formalist, Notre Dame Review, River Styx, Unsplendid. His fourth book, Upcycling Paumanok, which poet Mark Jarman has lauded as “the vital history of one of the crucial American places,” is forthcoming from Measure Press in 2016.

Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series Event
What the Critics Have Said

NED BALBO
“One of the things I love about The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems is how pop culture references to the monsters and heroes of horror films, science fiction novels and television series, sprinkled throughout, are not glibly hip, but both personal and universalizing — we see them for the modern mythology they are. The father of modern horror, Edgar Allan Poe, himself provides a thread running through this book-length meditation on adoption and identity, on love and heartbreak, alienation and belonging.”
A. E. Stallings, poet & translator, author of Hapax: Poems and Olives: Poems

JANE SATTERFIELD
“Fascinating and revelatory, Her Familiars explores the culture of war and female experience through a varied and lively mix of forms. Here we find epistles, refrains, litanies, elegies, and even a poem inspired by the iTunes party shuffle function.”
Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables: Poems and coauthor of The Tilted World: A Novel
“Jane Satterfield brings an astonishing range of subjects to Her Familiars, handling them with keen intelligence, musical intricacy, and tonal dexterity. Here, she tells of a child’s encounter of tragedy through a poetry recitation, or the life of an exemplary (and little known) woman ceramic artist, or the collapse of human communities through history (concluding, disconcertingly, with the vanishing of bees today). Jane Satterfield’s poems are intimate, graceful, and brilliant, composed around issues of social and political importance.
Kevin Prufer, author of Fallen From a Chariot and In a Beautiful Country

Cosponsored By:
English
MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
Pearl Hogrefe Fund
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Thursday, December 15, 2015

Saving Biodiversity in Southeast Asia

David Wilcove
Thursday, 03 Dec 2015 at 8:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union
David Wilcove is a conservation biologist whose work combines research in ecology and the social sciences to develop innovative ways to protect biodiversity in Asia, South America, and North America. His work has addressed such issues as deforestation, commercial logging, agriculture, and the wild animal trade. Wilcove’s distinguished career in conservation demonstrates the active interface between the non-profit sector, government agencies, academia, and society-at-large. He has worked as an ecologist for the Environmental Defense Fund, The Wilderness Society and The Nature Conservancy and is currently Professor of Public Affairs and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Wilcove is the author of two books, No Way Home: The Decline of the World’s Great Animal Migrations and The Condor’s Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America. Paul L. Errington Memorial LectureDavid Wilcove served as Senior Ecologist at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, DC, from 1991 to 2001. His work there focused on developing economically and scientifically sound policies for protecting endangered species.From 1986 to 1991 he was Senior Ecologist for The Wilderness Society, where he helped to develop the scientific foundation for the Society’s arduous and successful campaign to protect the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. Prior to joining the staff of The Wilderness Society, he was a Research Scientist in Zoology for The Nature Conservancy.Professor Wilcove has served on the board of directors of the American Bird Conservatory, Rare, the Society for Conservation Biology, and on the editorial boards of Conservation Biology and Ecological Applications. He is the author of numerous scientific publications, book chapters, and popular articles dealing with conservation biology, endangered species, biogeography, and ornithology. A 1980 graduate of Yale University, David Wilcove holds advanced degrees from Princeton University (MA, Biology, 1982 and Ph.D., Biology, 1985).

Cosponsored By:
Agronomy
College of Agriculture & Life Sciences
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Ecology, Evolution & Organismal Biology
Natural Resource Ecology & Management
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Monday, February 8, 2016

Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story

Marion Blumenthal Lazan
Monday, 08 Feb 2016 at 7:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

Marion Blumenthal Lazan provides a moving firsthand account of the Blumenthal family’s life in Germany from the events preceding Kristallnacht to imprisonment in concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, to liberation in April 1945. She was eleven years old when the family finally gained its freedom. She is the coauthor of Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story and subject of the PBS documentary Marion’s Triumph. Her story is a life-affirming, inspirational narrative of survival, reconciliation and the limits of endurance, and renews one’s faith in humanity.

Learn more about Marion Blumenthal Lazan and the book Four Perfect Pebbles

Cosponsored By:
Ames Jewish Congregation
Health Promotion Club
History
ISU Hillel
Kawaler Foundation Fund for Judaic Studies
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

The Arctic Cycle: The Art of Climate Change

Chantal Bilodeau
Tuesday, 09 Feb 2016 at 8:00 pm
Maintenance Shop, Memorial Union

With work underway on a cycle of eight plays, Chantal Bilodeau is giving an artistic voice to the challenge of a changing Arctic environment. Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle—an organization created to support the writing, development and production of eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic—and the founder of the international network Artists and Climate Change. Recent awards include the Woodward International Playwriting Prize as well as First Prize in the Earth Matters on Stage Ecodrama Festival and the Uprising National Playwriting Competition. She is the recipient of a Jerome Travel & Study Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Compton Foundation grant, and a U.S. Department of State Federal Assistance Award.
Bilodeau has written about the intersection of arts and climate change in American Theatre Magazine, the World Policy Institute blog Arctic in Context, HowlRound, and the blog Cultures of Energy at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, and presented at the annual conference of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, York University, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Tufts University, and Rice University. She is a co-organizer of the international Climate Change Theatre Action. For More Information: “The Art of Climate Change.” Canadian Wildlife Federation Magazine 5 July 2015.

Monday, February 29, 2016

Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency

David W. Orr
Monday, 29 Feb 2016 at 8:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

David W. Orr is “Counselor to the President” Oberlin College. He is the author of seven books, including Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse, and co-editor of three others. His eighth book, Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency will be published by Yale University Press in 2016. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or advisor to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently he is a Trustee of the Bioneers, Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012). He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Hands to Earth: Exploring Agriculture through Performance Art

Cherie Sampson
Tuesday, 29 March 2016 at 7:00 pm
Campanile Room, Memorial Union

Cherie Sampson is a visual artist and dancer who creates multi-media videos and installations focusing on ecology and agriculture. She will discuss her current project, “Hands to Earth,” which explores Midwestern small-scale agriculture through filmed dance performances in fields and orchards.
Her presentation includes video examples of her work as well as a performance of a short dance piece from “Hands to Earth.” Sampson hopes to create a dialog about the importance of agriculture beyond agricultural science. She earned an MFA from the University of Iowa in Intermedia and Video Art, teaches at the University of Missouri, and has exhibited and performed in places such as Finland, Hong Kong, and Italy. Her fellowships and grants include two Fulbright Awards and a Change Foundation Grant. AgArts Annual Lecture.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

560 Environmental Field Experience Presentations
Saturday, 9 April 2016 at 7-9 pm
Campanile Room, Memorial Union

Ten graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment will give presentations and short readings about their English 560: Environment Field Experiences. Presenters include Cathleen Bascom, William Bonfiglio, Taylor Brorby, Corrina Carter, Chloe Clark, Elizabeth Giorgi, Ana Hurtado, Erin Schmiel, Dana Thomann, and Adam Wright.

ALSO OF INTEREST — AgArts Annual Lecture

Local Wonders Potluck—AgArts Grant Event

Sunday, 10 April 2016 at 6 pm – Alluvial Brewing Company
Bring dish + cash donation to support local grants! Live music! Trivia! Door Prizes! Potluck at local brewery to choose AgArts grant recipient!

The Natural and Political Migrations of Northern Greece

Julian Hoffman
Sunday, 10 April 2016 at 7:00 pm – Gallery, Memorial Union
Julian Hoffman’s book, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World was awarded the 2012 AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction and the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature. Hoffman lives beside the Prespa Lakes in northwestern Greece, the first transboundary park in the Balkans. Shared with Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the lake basin is home to a rich range of people and languages, mammals and birds, wild flowers and habitats. It is a place of great diversity. Hoffman earns his living monitoring vulnerable, upland bird species where wind farms have been built or proposed. Hoffman’s other fiction and non-fiction have appeared, or are forthcoming, in EarthLines, Kyoto Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Briar Cliff Review, Wild Apples, Flyway, The Redwood Coast Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Silk Road Review, Three Coyotes and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Book Trailer: The Small Heart of Things
Links to more of Hoffman’s work:
Faith in a Forgotten Place.” Terrain.org. 2011 Nonfiction Award.
“Time in Karst Country” Terrain.org Summer/Spring 2011.
“Pelicans.” Terrain.org Winter/Spring 2008.

Friday, April 22, 2016

All the Land to Hold Us: An Earth Day Reading

Rick Bass
Friday, 22 April 2016 at 7:00 pm – Pioneer Rom, Memorial Union

Author and environmentalist Rick Bass is the author of over twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Oil Notes, The Ninemile Wolves, The Lost Grizzlies, Winter, The Deer Pasture, Wild to the Heart, and The Book of Yaak. His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and his 2002 collection, The Hermit’s Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Bass has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the O. Henry Award and his stories have been collected in The Best American Short Stories. A Texan by birth, Bass worked as a gas and oil geologist in Mississippi after earning a degree from Utah State University. His autobiography, Why I Came West, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. Bass’ most recent books are All the Land to Hold Us, an oil exploration novel set in West Texas, and The Black Rhinos of Namibia: Searching for Survivors in the African Desert.Bass’ forthcoming short story collection, For a Little While, has been praised by Joyce Carol Oates as “nothing short of remarkable.” She writes: “Even amid the threat of annihilation, Bass finds the promise of redemption. Grace has always been the great, elusive subject of his short fiction, and the extraordinary, transcendent stories collected here pursue it in myriad and seamless ways.” Bass lives in the Yaak Valley in Montana, where he serves on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Small Buried Things: Poetry & Music—Debra Marquart & The Bone People

Sunday, 1 May 2016 at 2 pm
Ames Public Library

Join us for an afternoon of music and poetry. ISU Professor, Debra Marquart will read from her new poetry collection, Small Buried Things, and team up with musicians Anthony Stevens and Peter Manesis to perform new songs from their forthcoming CD of music.

Debra
Marquart is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. She is the author of five books, including, most recently, Small Buried Things: Poems. Marquart’s short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, draws on her experiences as a female road musician, and her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the “Elle Lettres” award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award.

Her work has received numerous awards including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship, the 2013 Wachtmeister Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Normal School Poetry Prize, and the 2014 Paumanok Poetry Award, and has appeared in numerous journals including The North American Review, Alligator Juniper, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Narrative Magazine, The Sun, The Normal School, River Styx, Orion, and Witness.

Friday, Mary 6, 2016

MFA Thesis Festival

Friday, 6 May 2016 at 12-2 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Graduating MFA writers will read excerpts from their theses. Join us for this celebration with friends and family!

Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writer Series

2022-2023 Series

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Celebrating Romeo Oriogun: Winner of the Nigerian Prize for Literature

Friday, February 3, 2023

Home Voices Festival

Home Voices Authors

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Michael Walsh | Queer Ecology: A Moderated Conversation on Creativity, Craft, and Editing

Michael Walsh | Poetry as a Wedge into the World

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Yvette Nolan | The Unplugging: (Re)Writing the Apocalypse

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

The Great Derangement: Writing and Researching Climate Change Narratives

Amitav Ghosh | The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

The Farmer’s Lawyer | Researching & Writing a Legal Narrative

Sarah Vogel | The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm

2019-2020 Series

WHERE SOCIAL & ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MEET

Friday September 13, 2019

Poets, Indigo Moor & Lee Ann Roripaugh — Signal Poetry Festival Reading

ADDITIONAL EVENT:

Monday, October 28, 2019

Rob Nixon — Environmental Martyrs and the Fate of the Forest Monday, October 28, 7 PM Sun Room, Memorial Union

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Kristen Iversen — Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats Tuesday, December 3, 7 pm Sun Room, Memorial Union

Friday, January 31, 2020

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Rick Bass — The Traveling Feast: On the Road and At the Table with My Heroes Tuesday, February 18 8 PM, Gallery

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Katy Yocom — Three Ways to Disappear Tuesday, March 10, 7 PM Gallery, Memorial Union

ADDITIONAL EVENT: Katy Yocom — Craft Discussion: Writing in the Age of Extinction Tuesday, March 10, 2 – 3 PM Gallery, Memorial Union

Sheryl St. Germain — Songs for a Son: On Lyricism, Addiction, and Recovery Tuesday, April 7 6 PM, Pioneer Room

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Your One Wild & Precious Life — MFA Creative Writing & Environment Faculty Reading Wednesday, April 22 7 PM, Pioneer Room

SPONSORS

2018-2019 Series

Monday, September 17, 2018

Latina Memories: A Chilean Human Rights Perspective

December 2, 2018

Man Cave: A One-Man Sci-Fi Climate Change Tragicomedy Timothy Mooney, Playwright/Actor Sunday, December 2, 2018, 7:30 pm 308 Carver Hall

Sunday, January 27, 2019

MFA Program Home Voices Festival Ames Public Library, Farwell T. Brown Auditorium Sunday, January 27, 2019, 2:00 – 5:00 pm

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Bringing Our Soil Back to Life David Montgomery Thursday, March 28, 2019, 7:00 pm, Great Hall, Memorial Union

Monday, April 8, 2019

Epic, Funny, Sad, Strange, True: The Stories We Tell and Why We Tell Them – Kira Obolensky Monday, April 8, 2019, 8:00 pm Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Renewing Reciprocity: Indigenous Food Systems and the Honorable Harvest Robin Wall Kimmerer Wednesday, April 17, 2019, 7:00 pm Sun Room, Memorial Union

Thursday, April 25, 2019

The Art of Fiction A Reading & Conversation with Margot Livesey Thursday, April 25, 2019, 7:00 pm Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Thursday, April 25, 2019

AFTERNOON CRAFT TALK The Hidden Machinery: The Art of Writing, Margot Livesey Thursday, April 25, 2019, 2:10 pm Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

2017-2018 Series

Monday, September 18, 2017

Medical Apartheid: The History of Experimentation on Black Americans Harriet Washington Monday, September 18, 2017 Great Hall/South Ballroom/Oak Room

Sunday, February 18, 2018

The Artist in the World: Poetry & Playwriting Heather Derr-Smith & Charissa Menefee Sunday, February 18, 2018, at 2:00 pm Campanile Room, Memorial Union

THIS EVENTS HAS BEEN POSTPONED! CHECK BACK FOR FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Food Security Winona LaDuke Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 7:00 pm Great Hall, Memorial Union

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Bad Feminist Roxane Gay Thursday, April 5 2018 at 8:00 pm Great Hall, Memorial Union

Telling Necessary Stories: Q & A on the Craft of Writing with Roxane Gay Thursday, April 5, 2018 at 4:00 – 5:00 pm Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Writing Science Fiction Thrillers in the Age of Climate Change

Writing Brave: Q & A on the Craft of Writing with Paolo Bacigalupi

2016-2017 Series

Thursday, September 15, 2016

A Wild Life

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Which Future? Fiction and the Everything Change

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

My Life on the Road

Thursday, March 23, 2017

(Un)Natural Histories: From Fantasy to Historical Fiction — A Reading

From Fantasy to Historical Fiction: Two Novelists on Craft

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Eco-Theatre: The Intersection of Art, Politics, and Environmental Science Activists – A Playwright’s Talk

Rob Nixon — Environmental Martyrs and the Fate of the Forest
Monday, October 28, 7 PM
Sun Room, Memorial Union

Kristen Iversen — Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Tuesday, December 3, 7 pm
Sun Room, Memorial Union

Rick Bass — The Traveling Feast: On the Road and At the Table with My Heroes
Tuesday, February 18
8 PM, Gallery

Katy Yocom — Three Ways to Disappear
Tuesday, March 10, 7 PM
Gallery, Memorial Union

ADDITIONAL EVENT:
Katy Yocom — Craft Discussion: Writing in the Age of Extinction
Tuesday, March 10, 2 – 3 PM
Gallery, Memorial Union

Sheryl St. Germain — Songs for a Son: On Lyricism, Addiction, and Recovery
Tuesday, April 7
6 PM, Pioneer Room

Your One Wild & Precious Life — MFA Creative Writing & Environment Faculty Reading
Wednesday, April 22
7 PM, Pioneer Room

Man Cave: A One-Man Sci-Fi Climate Change Tragicomedy
Timothy Mooney, Playwright/Actor
Sunday, December 2, 2018, 7:30 pm
308 Carver Hall

MFA Program Home Voices Festival
Ames Public Library, Farwell T. Brown Auditorium
Sunday, January 27, 2019, 2:00 – 5:00 pm

Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
David Montgomery
Thursday, March 28, 2019, 7:00 pm, Great Hall, Memorial Union

Epic, Funny, Sad, Strange, True: The Stories We Tell and Why We
Tell Them – Kira Obolensky
Monday, April 8, 2019, 8:00 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Renewing Reciprocity: Indigenous Food Systems and the Honorable Harvest
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Wednesday, April 17, 2019, 7:00 pm
Sun Room, Memorial Union

The Art of Fiction
A Reading & Conversation with Margot Livesey
Thursday, April 25, 2019, 7:00 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

AFTERNOON CRAFT TALK
The Hidden Machinery: The Art of Writing, Margot Livesey
Thursday, April 25, 2019, 2:10 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union

Medical Apartheid: The History of Experimentation on Black Americans
Harriet Washington
Monday, September 18, 2017
Great Hall/South Ballroom/Oak Room

The Artist in the World: Poetry & Playwriting
Heather Derr-Smith & Charissa Menefee
Sunday, February 18, 2018, at 2:00 pm
Campanile Room, Memorial Union

Food Security
Winona LaDuke
Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 7:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

Bad Feminist
Roxane Gay
Thursday, April 5 2018 at 8:00 pm
Great Hall, Memorial Union

Telling Necessary Stories: Q & A on the Craft of Writing with Roxane Gay
Thursday, April 5, 2018 at 4:00 – 5:00 pm
Pioneer Room, Memorial Union