Last Thursday, we had the pleasure of reading at the Laramie County Public Library in Cheyenne. Lilly, Alec, Ammon, Liz, and Kat all read from their work. The LCPL is pretty swank and includes this weird device where you insert a coin and it spins round and round in a wide bowl. We also enjoyed some dope teppanyaki on the program’s dime at Wasabi.
Neltje, a friend of the Creative Writing Program, has generously offered use of her cabins along Crazy Woman Creek in the Bighorn Mountains to MFA students. Last weekend, Brad Watson and six graduate students drove up from Laramie to spend the weekend enjoying the outdoors.
The road to “Big Crazy,” the biggest of Neltje’s cabins, and the only one with running water and electricity.
Kat Williams, apparently ecstatic to be on the porch of Big Crazy.
Ammon Medina and Alec Osthoff look down onto the valley from the porch of Big Crazy.
The view descending from the mountains on a very primitive two-track.
“Mini Crazy,” the primitive cabin closest to Big Crazy, which sits just beside Crazy Woman Creek. It’s heated by a wood stove, which we had to feed through the night, as it dipped into single digits outside.
Liz Kulze, Kat Williams, Carly Fraysier, Alec Osthoff, and Ammon Medina hike a trail up to “White Lightning,” another of Neltje’s primitive cabins.
Beautiful rock formations along the trail that Neltje has appropriately named the “good rocks.”
The University of Wyoming MFA program is pleased to host ZZ Packer this January as a Spring 2013 Visiting Writer. Packer will consult with fiction students and read manuscripts. She will also give a public reading at the Albany County Public Library on January, 31st from 7:00pm – 8:00pm. The reading will be followed by a book signing, sponsored by Second Story Books.
ZZ Packer is the author of the short story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. She was selected as one of The New Yorker magazine’s “20 under 40” luminary fiction writers in June 2010. She has been awarded many fellowships and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.
The UW MFA program is excited and honred to have ZZ Packer visiting us.
DON’T MISS THIS CATASTIC TIME. But, seriously, more than cats, it will be wonderful. 
This event is going to be great, especially since it’s Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s only speaking engagement all year (or so we were told).
Congratulations to second-year poetry candidate, Brock Michael Jones, who was named a finalist in the Iowa Review’s Jeff Sharlet Memorial Prize for Veterans. The contest is for U.S. military veterans and active duty personnel. It is hosted by The Iowa Review and made possible by a gift from the family of Jeff Sharlet (1942–69), a Vietnam veteran and antiwar writer and activist. The contest is open to veterans and active duty personnel writing in any genre and about any subject matter.
We couldn’t be more proud of Brock. What wonderful, wonderful news!
For those of you who don’t know, CAConrad describes himself as “the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift,” and we were lucky enough to have this incredible poet visit UW last week. His visit included a reading at Night Heron books where he read from his collection The Book of Frank, as well as his latest A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon. He also hosted one of his somatic workshops where new ideas for poetry/art/creation are generated through a series of exercises. These included dark chocolate and essential oils. Essentially, we love CA at UW. We hope he visits us again soon!
CAConrad reading from ‘A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon’ at Night Heron Books
congratulations to the wonderful katiecakes schmid! her poem “daughter psalms” won an AWP award and is going to be featured in “Quarterly West”. we are happy for you katie, and think that you should feel very very good about life. celebrate. dance like no one’s watching.
we were all precocious once.
creative writing @ the university of wyoming 