Category Archives: visiting writers

pinkmountain et jones

Posted on by under in the news, mfa shit, nonfictions, publishing, visiting writers

for your reading pleasure: an interview by mfa’er scott pinkmountain with pulitzer prize winning author edward p. jones, published earlier this week by the rumpus.  edward p. jones joined us last spring as the mfa program’s eminent writer is residence.  teaching a workshop in fiction, he worked closely with mfa students across genres.

save the date

Posted on by under good times yes?, literary events of note, mfa shit, poetics, student reading series, visiting writers

University of Wyoming MFA Student Reading Series presents…
Valzhyna Mort & Michael Zapruder
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 @ 7:00 pm
Second Story Books
Laramie, WY

come out & you will see these things.

Valzhyna Mort
Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union), in 1981, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. There is an urgency and vitality to her poems; the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god, and familial love—while many poems question what language is and challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how. The New Yorker writes, “Mort strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language.” Her new book of poetry, Collected Body, is due out from Copper Canyon in 2011. She lives and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland.

Michael Zapruder
For years, Zapruder played lead guitar in other people’s bands until the 1999 release of his album 52 Songs. For his ambitious debut, Zapruder composed and recorded a song a week for an entire year. Every album since has marked his evolution through the restless development of his arrangements, recording techniques, and unique lyrical approach that earned him the 2009 Independent Music Award for Best Folk/Singer-Songwriter Album. Zapruder’s most recent album, the soon to be released Pink Thunder, is a collaboration with poets touring on the rock-esque Poetry Bus. He lives in Oakland, CA.

meandering: in thought on foot

Posted on by under life in laramie, visiting writers

emailed rebecca solnit to organize mfa student outing — snowshoeing walk/hike outside of town in medicine bow national forest.  when is a walk more than a walk? when does it become a hike? when is a hike not just a walk in shoes that say, “I am not walking, I am hiking.”

from a 2009 interview with The Believer…
REBECCA SOLNIT: In Wanderlust, I wrote, “This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.”

faculty member andy fitch wrote a book about walking (ten walks/two talks). it’s very likely that he and rebecca have crossed paths at various mfa functions around town in the last couple of weeks.  did they discuss walking?

also from Solnit’s interview in The Believer…
“I STILL THINK THE REVOLUTION IS TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR POETRY, MEANDERING, FOR THE FRAIL AND VULNERABLE, THE RARE AND OBSCURE, THE IMPRACTICAL AND LOCAL AND SMALL.”