Program News
Fall 2012
Author Fanny Howe will be joining UMB's Creative Writing Program in Fall 2012 as our inaugural Visiting Writer. She is an internationally respected literary figure who is widely regarded as one of the most important American women of letters of our time. She has published twelve works of fiction, and over twenty volumes of poetry, as well as six books for young adults, and two books of memoir. Her countless awards include the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, given annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living US poet for a lifetime’s accomplishment, as well as the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize awarded annually by the Nation Magazine honoring an artist whose work supports “the arts and the cause of world peace.” Buffalo-born and Cambridge-raised Howe is also a noted civil rights activist whose novels, according to critic Joshua Glenn “about interracial love and utopian dreaming offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and 70s.” Her accomplishments in every genre, coupled with a lifetime’s dedication to social activism, make her singularly appropriate for UMass Boston.
Full Spring 2013 Lineup Coming Soon...
Global Voices Reading Series Fall 2012
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012 at 2:30pm Wheatley Hall 6th floor room 47: Eileen Myles was born in Boston, attended catholic schools in Arlington, Mass. and graduated from UMass Boston. She received her poetic education at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in 1975-77 where she participated in workshops lead by Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan and others. Her books include Inferno (novel, 2010), The Importance of Being Iceland/travel essays in art (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital art writing grant, Sorry, Tree (poetry, 2007), Tow w/ artist Larry C. Collins (2005), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (novel, 2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (stories, 1994). From 1984 through 1986 Myles was Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project. She is a Professor Emeritus of writing & literature at UC San Diego where she taught from 2002 to 2007. In spring 2010 she was the Hugo Writer at U. of Montana in Missoula. In November of 2010 she was the Fannie Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She contributes to a wide number of publications including Art Forum, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, TimeOut, Book Forum and AnOther Magazine. The Poetry Society of America awarded her the Shelley Prize in 2010. She lives in New York.
Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 at 2:30 Harbor Gallery: Patricia Smith, poet, teacher, performance artist and author, was born in 1955. She is the author of six books of poetry: Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012); Blood Dazzler (2008), A National Book Award finalist; Teahouse of the Almighty (2006), a National Poetry Series selection; Close to Death (1993); Big Towns, Big Talk (1992), which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award; and Life According to Motown (1991). Her poems have been published in many anthologies, including American Voices (2005), The Spoken Word Revolution (2003), and Bum Rush the Page (2003.) She is also the author of a history book, Africans in America (1998), along with a children’s book, Janna and the Kings (2003). She is currently working on Fixed on a Furious Star, a biography of Harriet Tubman. A four-time individual champion on the National Poetry Slam, Smith has also been a featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and has performed her work around the world. She has written and performed two one-woman plays, one of which was produced by Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theater Workshop. She is a Cave Canem faculty member, a professor of English at CUNY/College of Staten Island and a faculty member of the Sierra Nevada MFA program.
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 at 2 p.m. Wheatley Hall, 6th floor, room 47: Catherine Phil MacCarthy was born in Co. Limerick and studied at University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London. She taught at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) and at The Drama Centre, University College Dublin, before turning full-time to writing in 1999. She was the joint winner of the Poetry Ireland/Co-Operation North Sense of Place competition in 1991; a selection of her work was published under the title How High the Moon. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1990, was a prizewinner in the 1992 Patrick Kavanagh Awards, and shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in 1996. The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealíon awarded her bursaries for poetry in 1994, 1998, and 2007/8. She won The International Fish Poetry Prize in 2010, and has been awarded an artist’s residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais for spring of 2013 to work on a new collection of poems. She is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and has worked as Writer in Residence for the City of Dublin (1994), and at the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature, University College, Dublin (2002). She has also worked as guest writer at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, and leads workshops in Poetry at the Irish Writers Centre. She has published three volumes of poetry: This Hour of the Tide (Salmon, 1994), the blue globe (1998), and Suntrap (Blackstaff, 2007). She has also published a novel, One Room an Everywhere (Blackstaff, 2003). Her new book of poems, The Invisible Threshold, is due from Dedalus Press in September 2012.
Tuesday, November 27th, 2012 at 4:00 p.m. Healey Library Center for Library Instruction (4th fl, room 15): Four early career writers join us for our Global Voices Panel: Working. Writers, Matthew Ladd, Matthew Salesses, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, and Caroline Woods discuss their experiences going from the MFA to where they are now. Join us as our panelists discuss the idea “the working life” and what that means in relation to their writing. Matthew Ladd’s Book of Emblems was the winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and he is completing law school. Matthew Salesses is the author of The Last Repatriate and serves as the fiction editor for The Good Men Project. Cheryl Clark Vermeulen is the author of Dead-Eye Spring and teaches at MassArt and other area schools. Caroline Woods is completing a novel and serves as the administrator for Boston University’s Creative Writing Program.
