Writing Seminars Series | Graduate Student Series | M.A. in Writing Series
All readings are free and open to the public. If you would like to be included in our departmental e-mailings about upcoming events, please send a message to dbasford@jhu.edu with "Subscribe: Reading Series" in the subject heading.
Barry Nemett
Thursday, Feb. 7
6:00 p.m., Room 101 of F. Ross Jones Building, Mattin Center, Homewood Campus Artist Barry Nemett, painting department chair at Maryland Institute College of Art, will give a slide talk and reading from his new novel, Crooked Tracks, on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at The Johns Hopkins University. The presentation will begin at 6 p.m. in Room 101 of the F. Ross Jones Building, Mattin Center, on the Homewood campus at 3400 N. Charles St. in Baltimore. Admission is free and open to the public.
The slide talk, "Fiction and Vision: Pigments of Imagination," will explore the overlap of Nemett's twin passions, painting and writing. Recently published by Barnhardt & Ashe, Crooked Tracks is an unusual coming-of-age tale set in the 1960s that interweaves color reproductions of classical and contemporary masterworks with a compelling, intimate narrative. A book signing will follow Nemett's slide talk and reading. Refreshments will be served.
While it is not unusual for a painter to write poetry, essays or criticism, Nemett is one of only a few to publish a work of sustained fiction. Nemett has taught drawing and painting at MICA for more than 35 years, chairing the painting department there since 1990. He received his bachelor of fine arts degree at Pratt Institute and his master of fine arts degree at Yale University. In addition to his novel, he has written a textbook, Images, Objects, and Ideas: Viewing the Visual Arts (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1992), and numerous catalogue, magazine and journal articles.
Nemett has curated several traveling exhibitions and has exhibited his own work nationally and internationally. His visiting artist residencies have included the Art Institute of Chicago, New York Studio School and Princeton University, as well as international programs in Italy, France, Scotland and Japan. His awards include a Ford Foundation grant to Italy and an ITT International Travel Fellowship/Fulbright Hays grant to Spain.
"Fiction and Vision: Pigments of Imagination" is co-sponsored by Homewood Art Workshops, the Writing Seminars and Homewood Arts Programs. For information, call 410-516-6705.
Sabina Murray
Wednesday, Feb. 13
6:00 p.m., Remsen 101, Homewood Campus Sabina Murray is a award-winning Filipina-American screenwriter and novelist. The daughter of an American father and a Filipina mother, Murray grew up in Australia, Pennsylvania, and the Philippines. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1989, and completed her M.A. in English and creative writing from The University of Texas in 1994. Since then she has published four books of fiction: Slow Burn (1990), which was adapted into a movie starring Ray Liotta, Jolene Blalock, and LL Cool J.; The Caprices (Houghton Mifflin, 2002); A Carnivore's Inquiry (Grove, 2004); and Forgery (Grove, 2007). She wrote the screenplay for The Beautiful Country (2004), directed by Terrence Malick, and starring Nick Nolte and Bai Ling. Her fiction has also appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, and the New England Review. She was also the fiction judge for Drunken Boat’s First Annual Panliterary Awards.
She has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2003), The Beautiful Country was nominated for the Best First Screenplay Award (Independent Spirit Awards 2005), and A Carnivore's Inquiry was named a "Best Book of the Year" by The Chicago Tribune. She was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, and the Roger Muray Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy. Murray currently lives in western Massachusetts, where she is on the fiction faculty at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Samrat Upadhyay
Tuesday, Feb. 19
6:00 p.m., Maryland 110 Author of four books of fiction--Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Guru of Love, The Royal Ghosts, and the forthcoming The Queen's Pond (all from Houghton Mifflin)--Upadhyay has placed stories in Scribner's Best of the Writing Workshops and Best American Short Stories. He edited a special issue of the journal Manoa devoted to contemporary writing in Nepal. He teaches at Indiana University.
Nic Pizzolatto
Tuesday, Mar. 4
6:00 p.m., Remsen 101 A recent Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina, Pizzolatto is the author of Between Here and the Yellow Sea, and has published stories in The Atlantic Monthly, The Missouri Review, Shenandoah, and the Iowa Review. He teaches at the University of Chicago.
Elise Blackwell
Tuesday, Mar. 11
6:00 p.m., Remsen 101 Author of three novels--Grub, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, and Hunger--Blackwell has published stories in Witness, Seed, Global City Review, and Topic. She teaches at the University of South Carolina.
Vu Tran
Wednesday, Mar. 26
6:00 p.m., Remsen 101 Winner of an O. Henry Prize and a recent graduate of the UNLV creative writing Ph.D. program, Vu Tran has published stories in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and Glimmer Train Stories.
Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser
Tuesday, Apr. 8
6:00 p.m., Barnes & Noble Bookstore, 33rd and St. Paul Mary Jo Salter, Professor in The Writing Seminars, is the author of six collections of poems: Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (the 1988 Lamont Selection), Sunday Skaters (1994 National Book Critics Circle Award nominee), A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003), and due out this March, A Phone Call to the Future. Salter is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and has worked with composers Allen Bonde and Fred Hersch. She is also an essayist and reviewer for such publications as The New York Times Book Review and The Yale Review. She has received NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She serves on the board of the Amy Clampitt Fund, the Bogliasco Foundation, and The Kenyon Review, and has been Vice President of the Poetry Society of America since 1995.
Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. For three years he was a research fellow at the Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan, and has subsequently lived in Italy, England, Iceland and France. He is the author of five novels (Equal Distance, Hence, Seaward, The Friends of Freeland, and A Few Corrections), five volumes of poetry (Lettered Creatures, The Odd Last Thing She Did, Mail from Anywhere, Cats of the Temple, Hundreds of Fireflies, and Curves and Angles), a novel in verse (Darlington’s Fall), a collection of light verse, and a book of essays (Penchants and Places). He has also edited The Norton Book of Ghost Stories. Among his many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2005, the President of Iceland inducted him into the Order of the Falcon for his writings about Nordic literature.
Wyatt Prunty
Thursday, Apr. 24
6:00 p.m., Maryland 110, Homewood Campus Wyatt Prunty was born on May 15, 1947, in Humboldt, Tennessee, the son of Eugenia Wyatt and Merle Prunty. His family moved early in his life to Athens, where his father organized the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia. He received his undergraduate education at the University of the South (B.A., 1969) in Sewanee, Tennessee, where Allen Tate was one of his teachers, and where his first poems were published in the Sewanee Review under the editorship of Andrew Lytle. After three years in the navy, Prunty enrolled in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and received his M.A. in 1973. He earned his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, studying with Donald Stanford and Louis P. Simpson. He has taught at Louisiana State University, Virginia Tech, and since 1989, the University of the South, where he is Ogden D. Carlton Chair of English and director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Prunty's poetry collections include The Times Between (1982), What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986), Balance as Belief (1989), The Run of the House (1993), Since the Noon Mail Stopped (1997), and Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (2000). His book of essays about modern poetry, Fallen from the Symboled World: Precedents for the New Formalism, was published in 1990. He has also edited or coedited several literary anthologies.
Beth Ann Fennelly & Tom Franklin
Thursday, Sept. 27
6:00 p.m., Shaffer 3 Poet Beth Ann Fennelly's first book, Open House, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and her second book, Tender Hooks, was published by Norton in 2004. Novelist Tom Franklin is the author of Poachers: Stories, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. Both teach at the University of Mississippi.
Porochista Khakpour & Steve Scafidi
Thursday, Nov. 8
6:00 p.m., Remsen 101 - PLEASE NOTE ROOM CHANGE Porochista Khakpour is an alumna of The Writing Seminars graduate program who has just published her first novel tracing the lives of an Iranian-American family, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, with Grove Press. Steve Scafidi has published two books through Dave Smith's Southern Messenger Series at Louisiana State University Press, Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (2001) and For the Love of Common Words (2006), and works as a cabinet maker in West Virginia.
Douglas Dunn
Reading:
Monday, Nov. 12
6:00 p.m., Mergenthaler 111, Homewood Campus 96th Percy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Poetry Lecture:
Tuesday, Nov. 13
6:00 p.m., Maryland 110, Homewood Campus Reading from Elegies and Interview:
Inaugural Art and Psychiatry Series
Grief and Depression: Disease or the Human Condition
Introductory Remarks - Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D.
Reading from Elegies - Douglas Dunn
Interview with Douglas Dunn - J. Raymond DePaulo, Jr. M.D.
Thursday, Nov. 15
5:00 p.m., Hurd Hall, Johns Hopkins Medical School Renowned Scottish poet Douglas Dunn will visit Baltimore for three separate events, two
hosted by The Writing Seminars and one by the JH Medical School. Dunn has published over a dozen collections of poems, including the Whitbread Book of the Year, Elegies (1985). He is a Professor at the University of St. Andrews, and head of the Scottish Studies Center there.
Updated Feb. 4th, 2008. |
