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 2010 Poets & Writers Series

Thursday, February 25, 2010 - 8:00 p.m.
HANNAH TINTI
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has been sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award. The Good Thief was the winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Hannah Tinti also recently won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for her editorial work at One Story.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010, 3:00-4:30
JOHN YAU
Lecture: "Susceptible Materiality"
Main Campus, Anderson Hall, 8th Floor, Women's Studies Lounge,
1114 West Berks Street (corner of 11th & Berks Sts.)

Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 8:00 p.m.
JOHN YAU
Reading: Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

John Yau is a poet, fiction writer, art critic, publisher and editor. His recent books include A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 2008) and Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin, 2006). Since 2004, he has worked pro bono as the Art Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, a free, not-for-profit monthly covering the arts, which is archived on the Web (www.brooklynrail.org). He has received awards from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. John Yau's current projects include monographs on Martin Puryear and Robert Ryman for Phaidon, as well as books of poetry that will be published by Wave Books and Copper Canyon Press. He is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department of Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

Thursday, March 25, 2010 - 8:00 p.m.
SUSAN HOWE
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

Susan Howe is the author of a number of books of poetry, including Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990); Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996); and The Midnight (2003); and two books of criticism, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993); and My Emily Dickinson (1985). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and the important Language School gathering of poets, In the American Tree (edited by Ron Silliman). In 2003, Howe started collaborating with experimental musician David Grubbs. The results were released on two CDs: Thiefth (featuring the poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia) and Songs of the Labadie Tract. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Howe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and serves as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets. Her books have been translated into French, Swedish, Spanish, and Portuguese. She was recently awarded a 2009-10 Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin, where she spent the fall of 2009. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

Thursday, April 29, 2010 - 8:00 p.m.
JOANNE DAHME
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

Joanne Dahme is a native of Philadelphia and has lived in the Philadelphia area her entire life. She attended Villanova University to study civil engineering and later went on to Temple University to receive a Master's of Journalism as a way of pursuing her interest in writing. As a result of this combination, she found a career with the Philadelphia Water Department in its Public Affairs Division and the Department's Office of Watersheds. In 2001, she took a one-year sabbatical to focus on a Master's of Creative Writing degree from Temple University. Her young adult novels include The Vampire's Baby (2001); Creepers (2008); The Plague (2009); and Tombstone Tea (2009)—all published by Running Press, a division of Perseus Books. Joanne is married and has a son at Boston College.

Fall 2009 Poets & Writers Series

Thursday, September 3, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
LINH DINH
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1963, Linh Dinh came to the US in 1975. He has also lived in Italy and England. Author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006) and Jam Alerts (2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2009 by Seven Stories Press, he has had work anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004, 2007, and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present. He is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001), and has translated Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, The Poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (2006). The Village Voice chose Blood and Soap as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin and Reykjavik. His work also appears widely in Vietnamese.

Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
EILEEN MYLES
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

Eileen Myles is a poet (Sorry, Tree, School of Fish, Not Me, etc.) who writes fiction (Cool for You, Chelsea Girls), and whose The Importance of Being Iceland/Travel Essays in Art, for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant, came out in July from Semiotext(e)/MIT. She was the Artistic Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the ’80s. In 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States. She is now a Professor Emeritus of Writing at UCSD. She writes for Parkett, The Believer, Vice, The Nation, The Stranger, AnOther Magazine, and now here. The Inferno/A Poet’s Novel will probably be out next year. She lives in New York.

Thursday, October 22, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
PETER STRAUB
Temple University MAIN CAMPUS, Gladfelter Hall, Room 13, First Floor
1115 W. Berks St (11th and W. Berks Streets)

Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and the forthcoming Library of America’s 2-volume anthology, American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the HWA’s Life Achievement Award. In 2008, he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers.

Thursday, November 5, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
JULIANA SPAHR
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

Juliana Spahr is a poet, editor, and scholar. Her most recent book is The Transformation (Atelos: 2007), a book of prose which tells the story of three people who move between Hawai‘i and New York in order to talk about cultural geography, ecology, anticolonialism, queer theory, language politics, the academy, and recent wars. Spahr co-edited the journal Chain with Jena Osman from 1994-2005. With nineteen other poets she has been an editor of the collectively edited and collectively funded Subpress.

Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
THOMAS GLAVE
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222

Thomas Glave is the author of the fiction collections Whose Song? and Other Stories and The Torturer’s Wife, and the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award). He is the editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (winner of a 2008 Lambda Literary Award). A founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), Glave was 2008-09 Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. He teaches in the English department at SUNY Binghamton.

Spring 2009 Poets & Writers Series

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
Anselm Berrigan
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Anselm Berrigan is the author of three books of poetry, all published by Edge Books: Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Integrity & Dramatic Life. His book Free Cell will be published by City Lights in 2009. Berrigan is Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts, and also teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. From 2003-2007 he was the Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, published in 2005 by University of California Press. He's the current Poetry Editor of The Brooklyn Rail (brooklynrail.org) and lives in the East Village of Manhattan, where he grew up.

Thursday, February 26, 2008 - 8:00 p.m.
Kenneth Goldsmith
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Kenneth Goldsmith's is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City's WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. A book of his critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Thursday, March 26, 2008 - 8:00 p.m.
MAGGIE NELSON
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Maggie Nelson is the author of The Red Parts, a nonfiction book about her family, media spectacle, sexual violence, and criminal justice, and a critical study about poetry and painting, Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (winner of the 2008 Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes; Jane: A Murder, The Latest Winter, and Shiner. In 2007 she received an Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. Currently she’s working on a book of creative nonfiction about the color blue titled Bluets, due out from Wave Books in Fall 2009. She is on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles. 

Week of April 6
Cole Swenson, Spring 2009 Writer-in-Residence
lecture: Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - 3:00-4:30 Weigley Room, 9th floor Gladfelter Hall, Main Campus
reading: Thursday, April 9, 2008 - 8:00 p.m. Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Cole Swensen is the author of twelve volumes of poetry; the most recent is Ours (University of California Press). Others include Goest, Such Rich Hour, Oh, Try (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Noon (winner of the New American Poetry Series Award), Numen, Park, New Math (winner of the National Poetry Series), and It's Alive, She Says. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A highly regarded translator of French poetry, prose, and art criticism, her translation of Jean Fremon’s The Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation. She is the founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets. She is on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Washington D.C., Iowa City, and Paris. 

Thursday, April 23, 2008 - 8:00 p.m.
James Morrow 
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
James Morrow has been writing fiction since, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, he dictated “The Story of the Dog Family,” a three-page, six-chapter fantasy. Morrow has published nine novels and two short story collections.  He has won two World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, and the Grand Prix de Imaginaire.  The New York Times praised his postmodern historical epic, The Last Witchfinder, for fusing “storytelling, showmanship and provocative book-club bait ... into one inventive feat.”  Morrow followed this novel with a sequel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, which NPR called “an ingenious riff on Frankenstein.”  His novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, is set in 1945 and dramatizes the U.S. Navy’s attempts to leverage a Japanese surrender via a biological weapon strongly reminiscent of Godzilla.

Fall 2008 Poets & Writers Series

Thursday, September 18, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
EVA MEKLER’s first novel Sunrise Shows Late, was called “austerely beautiful” by Publishers Weekly. The Christian Science Monitor said it was “…told with a deep sense of compassion and a keen eye for character.” It takes place in Landsberg DP camp. Her most recent novel, The Polish Woman, was called “…a meticulous, raw study of the uneasy relationship between Catholic and Jewish Poles…” by The New York Times, “a stunner” by Kirkus Review and “…emotionally tantalizing…” by Publishers Weekly. Besides writing fiction, she is the author of six books on the theater and psychology and, under a pseudonym, a book on Yiddish slang. She is also an actress and has appeared in the Yiddish Theater. She is a school psychologist for the New York City Department of Education.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 | 3:00-4:30 p.m.
Weigley Room, 9th floor Gladfelter Hall, Main Campus (lecture)
and
Thursday, October 16, 2008 | 8:00 p.m. (reading)
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN is the author of four books — three works of fiction (The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband) and one work of non-fiction, The Art of Political Murder. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Ordinary Seaman, his second novel, was a finalist for the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. The Art of Political Murder was a New York Times 100 Notable Book of 2007 and a Washington Post Book World 100 Best Books of 2007. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently Allan K. Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His fiction and journalism have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City and Mexico City.

Thursday, October 30, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
PETER GIZZI’s books include The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from the Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Thursday, November 20, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Born in Tobago, M. NOURBESE PHILIP is a poet, novelist, and essayist who lives in Toronto, Canada. Her books of poetry include Thorns, Salmon Courage, She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks (winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literature), and Zong! (just published by Wesleyan University Press). Her novels include Harriet’s Daughter and Looking for Lingstone: An Odyssey of Silence. Her books of essays include Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture, Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel, and Geneology of Resistance and Other Essays. Her honors include grants from the Canada Council and the Toronto Arts Council, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Toronto Arts Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at Bellagio, Italy.

Thursday, December 4, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
JOSEPH MCELROY was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. He was educated at Williams College and Columbia University. He is the author of nine novels: A Smuggler’s Bible (1966) Hind’s Kidnap (1969), Ancient History: A Paraphase (1971), Lookout Cartridge (1974), Plus (1977), Women and Men (1987), The Letter Left to Me (1989), Actress in the House (2003), and Cannonball (forthcoming, 2007). A volume of his essays, Exponential (2003), has been published in Italy. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Among other universities he has taught at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, the University of Paris, and the City University of New York.

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.