Temple University Poets & Writers Series
Public readings by Recognized and Emerging Authors

The Poets & Writers Series is sponsored by the Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, with the assistance of the Richard Moyer Fund. Each year a number of poets and fiction writers are invited to speak (usually on Thursdays) to members of both the Temple community and the local Philadelphia arts scene. Joining each invited writer is a writer from Temple's graduate program in Creative Writing. For a list of all writers who have visited Temple's Creative Writing program, click here.

All events are free and open to the public.

Spring 2008 Poets & Writers Series

January 30
3:00-5:00, Weigley Room, 9th floor Gladfelter Hall, Main Campus
TRACIE MORRIS is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer, with installations at the Whitney Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. The recipient of numerous awards for poetry and performance, she holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Currently she is Visiting Professor of English at Temple University and the CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

February 21
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
MENDI & KEITH OBADIKE make music, art, and literature. The Washington Post calls their work “daring, funny and innovative.”  A series of Mendi and Keith’s media works are featured in the anthologies Re: skin and in the forthcoming Sound Unbound (both from M.I.T. Press).  In a 2001 performance work they offered Keith’s blackness for sale on eBay with a list of benefits and warnings. In 2004 Mendi’s book of poetry Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press) received the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and Keith received a Connecticut of Critic’s Circle Award for Outstanding Sound Design for work at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Recently they completed Big House/Disclosure, a 200 hour house song/sound installation about slavery for Northwestern University for which they received a Pick-Laudati Award. Keith is an assistant professor in the College Arts and Communication at William Paterson University.  Mendi is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

March 6
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
JENNIFER EGAN is a novelist, journalist and short story writer. Her most recent novel, The Keep, was a National Bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book for 2006. Other of her books are Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, The Invisible Circus, which became a movie starring Cameron Diaz, and Emerald City and Other Stories. She has written for the New York Times Magazine on topics such as homeless children, Catholic seminarians, and single mothers using donor sperm. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope and Ploughshares, among others. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was recently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Born in Chicago, she lives currently in Brooklyn.

March 20
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
Born in Toronto, for many years Canadian writer LISA ROBERTSON lived in Vancouver, where she was a member of The Kootenay School ofWriting, and Artspeak Gallery. Her books of poetry include XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic, The Weather, and Rousseau's Boat. In Spring 2006, Bookthug, in Toronto, published a new book of poems, The Men. She writes essays and collaborative texts for the visual arts, and these have been collected in the book Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She has taught or held residencies at many universities, including Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. After 4 years living in France, where she began translating the poetry of Eric Suchere and Michele Bernstein's Situationist novel Tous les chevaux du roi, she is now visiting artist at California College of the Arts.

April 10
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
MICHAEL SWANWICK has received a Hugo Award for short fiction an unprecedented five times in six years.  He has also received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial and World Fantasy Awards. His stories regularly appear in Best of the Year anthologies and have been translated and published throughout the world.  His newest novel, The Dragons of Babel, appeared in January from Tor Books. The Dog Said Bow-Wow, his most recent collection, is available from Tachyon Publications. With his wife, Marianne Porter, he lives in Philadelphia

For more information, call 215.204.1796.