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Towson LITERARY Reading Series FALL 2009

 WORDS, SOUNDS, STORIES

All readings are free and start at 5 p.m. in Lecture Hall 238

 Wednesday, Oct. 7     Lia Purpura, winner of the Towson University Prize for Literature

LIA PURPURA is the author of three collections of poems, two collections of essays and one collection of translations.  Her books have won many awards, including the most recent Towson University Prize for Literature for the essay collection On Looking (Sarabande Books, 2006) and in 1996  for The Brighter the Veil, a book of poems. On Looking was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her collection of poems, King Baby (Alice James Books, 2008) won the Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year. Purpura is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship (translation, Warsaw, Poland), and a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. She is writer-in-residence at Loyola University and lives in Baltimore with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son, Joseph.

Thursday, Oct. 15     Sherrie Flick and Shelley Puhak

SHERRIE FLICK is author of Reconsidering Happiness (University of Nebraska Press), her first novel. She is also author of the award-winning flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume Press, 2004). Her flash fiction has appeared in anthologies such as W.W. Norton’s Sudden Fiction (2007) and Flash Fiction Forward (2006), as well as Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Minuscule Fiction (MAMMOTH Press, 2003) and You Have Time for This (Ooligan Press, 2007). Her fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, Quick Fiction, and Freight Stories, among others.

SHELLEY PUHAK lives in Baltimore, Maryland.  Her first poetry collection, Stalin in Aruba, was just published by Black Lawrence Press.  Poems  from the collection have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Delta Review, New South, Ontario Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Her work has received grants and awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.  She is currently writer-in-residence at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.

Wednesday, Oct. 28     Kim Jensen and Eileen Rudnick

KIM JENSEN is the author of Bread Alone, a poetry collection published this fall by the University of Syracuse Press. Her poems have previously appeared in such journals as Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, The Baltimore Review, Al Jadid, Rain Taxi Review, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Left Curve, and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. She is also author of the novel The Woman I Left Behind, which The Jordan Times called “a love story with an edge to it.” She is associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County in Maryland.

EILEEN RUDNICK is a nine-year survivor of traumatic brain injury.  She spends her time serving the brain injury community as a volunteer.  Her hobbies are writing, sewing, walking, and working out at the gym.  She is also a college student with a 4.0 GPA seeking a degree in English. Eileen and her husband of 38 years co-facilitate a brain injury support group near their home. Her essay “To the Summit or Bust” is included in Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability, a collection of award-winners from the first Helen Keller Foundation International Memoir Writing Competition, edited by Diane Scharper, an adjunct professor in the English Department at Towson University, and Philip Scharper Jr.

Thursday, Nov. 5     Geoffrey Becker

GEOFFREY BECKER is the author of two short stories collections (Black Elvis, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize, and Dangerous Men, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize) and a novel, Bluestown. His novel Hot Springs will be published in spring 2010 by Tin House Press. He has received the Nelson Algren Award and an NEA fellowship, and his story “Black Elvis” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2000. He teaches at Towson University and directs Towson’s graduate professional writing program.

Thursday, Nov. 12     Laurie Clements Lambeth and Josh Weil

LAURIE CLEMENTS LAMBETH’S debut poetry collection, Veil and Burn, was selected by Maxine Kumin for the National Poetry Series.  Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, with poetry forthcoming in Seneca Review.  An MFA and PhD graduate of the University of Houston, she is at work on a book of creative nonfiction and on her second book of poems.

JOSH WEIL is the author of The New Valley (Grove, 2009), a New York Times Editors Choice.  A former Fulbright fellow, he has written for Granta, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, New England Review, and Narrative Magazine. He has received fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers conferences, and is currently the Tickner Writing Fellow at Gilman School in Baltimore.

Tuesday, Dec. 1     Leslie F. Miller and Richard Murphy

LESLIE F. MILLER, author of Let Me Eat Cake, a collection of essays, is a freelance writer, a graphic designer, a former college English instructor, an editor, a poet, and a mosaicist.  She likes breaking things and putting them back together in a random, yet tasteful, order.  She is currently working on a book about rock 'n' roll camps for kids and adults.

RICHARD MURPHY was born in Lynn, Massachusetts and has taught writing and literature for twenty-three years at Bradford College, Emmanuel College and now at Virginia Commonwealth University. Credits include a book of poems The Apple in the Monkey Tree by Codhill Press; chapbooks Great Grandfather by Pudding House Publications, Family Secret by Finishing Line Press, Hunting and Pecking by Ahadada Press, and Phoems for Mobile Vices by BlazeVox Books; poems in hundreds of journals, stateside and abroad; and essays in refereed journals, including Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture and The Journal of Ecocriticism “Special Issue.”

The Towson Literary Reading Series is a service of the Department of English with assistance from the Clarisse Mechanic Fund and the College of Liberal Arts.