Orr Street Studios Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions

Hearing Voices with Anne Barngrover and Marlene Lee

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:13:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 23, for readings of poetry by Anne Barngrover and fiction by Marlene Lee.

ANNE BARNGROVER

Anne Barngrover’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Meridian, Ninth Letter, Florida Review, Michigan Quarterly and elsewhere. She earned an MFA at Florida State University and is a first-year PhD candidate in poetry at University of Missouri. She is currently searching for a home for her first manuscript, Yell Hound Blues.

MARLENE LEE

Marlene Lee's novel The Absent Woman is being published this spring by Holland House Books. She has subsidized her writing career by working as a teacher, professor and court reporter. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications. Two sons and their families (four grandchildren) live on the East Coast. Marlene lives in Columbia and maintains her apartment in New York City, where she worked and wrote for many years.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Gordon Sauer and Beth Peterson

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:26:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 9, for readings of fiction by Gordon Sauer and creative nonfiction by Beth Peterson.

GORDON SAUER

Gordon Sauer's fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and his nonfiction in Columbia College Today. He earned his MFA from Columbia University and now teaches in the English Department at the University of Missouri.

BETH PETERSON

Beth Peterson is a PhD candidate in nonfiction at the University of Missouri. She has an MA from Wheaton College and an MFA from the University of Wyoming. Having been a wilderness guide before she began writing, she is currently working on a book of essays set in a disappearing glacial landscape in Norway. Beth holds a departmental creative writing fellowship, is a Creative Arts Fellow through the American-Scandinavian Foundation and has work forthcoming in Fourth Genre.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Monica Hand and LaTanya McQueen

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 20:28:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, for readings of poetry by Monica Hand and fiction by LaTanya McQueen.

MONICA HAND

Monica A. Hand is a poet and book artist and a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Missouri. Her book of poetry, me and nina, was named one of the top 40 poetry books of 2012 by Coldfront. Hand's poems have appeared in Black Renaissance Noir, Drunken Boat, African-American Poetry for the 21st Century, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade and elsewhere. She holds a MFA in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University. She is a Cave Canem fellow and a founding member of Poets for Ayiti, a diverse collective of poets committed to the power of poetry to transform and educate. She is also a member of Alice James Book's Cooperative Board.

LA TANYA MCQUEEN

LaTanya McQueen's stories have been published in The North American Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Fourteen Hills, Potomac Review and War, Literature, and the Arts, among others. She is a doctoral candidate in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri and is currently working on a novel that integrates the Black Power movement and the Greensboro Riots of 1979 and examines how these events affected two tobacco farming families in North Carolina.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Cornelius Eady and Anne Marie Macari

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:46:00 +0000

UPDATE

Bad news: Unfortunately, Cornelius Eady's flight was canceled, and he won't make it back to Columbia in time for the reading.
Good news: The wonderful Aliki Barnstone has agreed to fill in. So, please join us this evening to hear from Aliki and our special guest, Anne Marie Macari!

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 12, for readings by poets Anne Marie Macari and Aliki Barnstone.

ANNE MARIE MACARI

Anne Marie Macari is the author of three books of poetry, most recently She Heads Into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008). In 2000 Macari won the APR/Honickman first book prize for Ivory Cradle, which was followed by Gloryland (2005, Alice James Books). She has also coedited, with Carey Salerno, the anthology, Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry From Alice James Books. Macari has been published widely in anthologies and magazines. She founded and teaches in the MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation at Drew University in New Jersey.

ALIKI BARNSTONE
Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic and editor. She is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Bright Body (White Pine, 2011) and Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009) and a book of criticism, Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development (University Press of New England). She is the editor of two anthologies of women’s poetry, a book of literary critical essays and an edition of H.D.’s Trilogy (New Directions, 1998), for which she wrote the introduction and readers’ notes, and the translator of The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 2006). In 2014, Carnegie Mellon University Press will reissue her book, Madly in Love, as a Carnegie-Mellon Classic Contemporary. She is professor of English and creative writing at the University of Missouri, where she serves as series editor of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Laura McHugh and William Claassen

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:22:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 12, for readings of fiction by Laura McHugh and travel writing by William Claassen.

LAURA MCHUGH

Laura McHugh’s debut novel, The Weight of Blood, will be published by Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau in 2014. The novel will also be published in Italy, Germany, The Netherlands and the U.K. Her short fiction has appeared in Confrontation and Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. A former software developer, she now lives the glamorous life of a stay-at-home mom in Columbia, Missouri, where she is at work on her second book.

WILLIAM CLAASSEN

William Claassen's most recent book, Journey Man: A World Calling (Cornel & Willliams), is a gutsy, humorous, and sometimes tragic odyssey that begins on an Israeli collective farm in 1974. Years later, it draws to close at an all-night peyote ceremony on a Native American Reservation. The odyssey takes the reader into nine countries, on four continents, over a span of three decades. Claassen, a nomad raised on the Kansas plains, has tread numerous paths over the years. From community organizing in the South and stage acting in the East to tree planting in the Northwest and development work abroad.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Elizabeth Hatmaker and J. Bowers

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:42:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 29, for readings of poetry by Elizabeth Hatmaker and fiction by J. Bowers.

ELIZABETH HATMAKER

Elizabeth Hatmaker is the author of Girl in Two Pieces (BlazeVOX 2010), which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times book award. Her poetry is featured in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film(City Lights 2009), ACM, Bird Dog, Epoch, MiPOesias, Mandorla, Mississippi Review, Mirage/Periodical and Projector Magazine. She teaches writing, cultural studies, film and urban education at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. She is currently at work on her second collection of poetry The Electric Nostalgia Coffin.

J. BOWERS

J. Bowers’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Portland Review, cream city review, Redivider, The Indiana Review and other nationally circulated journals. She holds a B.A. in English and creative writing from Goucher College and an M.A. in the same from Hollins University. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) at the University of Missouri, working on a collection of short historical fiction about horses, film, photography, death and obsolescence. In her free time, she likes to think about the hungry ghosts of silent Hollywood while she rides her little yellow pony through the totemic Missouri wilderness.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Winter Break

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:11:00 +0000

Thanks, everyone, for a wonderful season of Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions at Orr Street Studios!

We're taking a break for the holidays, but we'll be back in late January. Check here for next semester's schedule.

If you are interested in sharing your writing or visual art with the community, please contact us at orr.series@gmail.com, or send us a message on Facebook.

Happy winter!

Seeing Visions at Grindstone Studios

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 22:35:00 +0000

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 27, for a very special evening at Grindstone Studios, Columbia's new art print studio.

Grindstone is a joint venture project run by Jeffrey Moore, Robert Friedman, Frank Stack and Byron Smith. Grindstone specializes in lithographic printing and has a library of prints from regional, national and international artists. Jeffrey Moore will talk about the lithographs while demonstrating the various stages in this painstaking process first invented in 1796.

The entire Seeing Visions evening will be at Grindstone Studios, which is next door to (north of) Orr Street Studios, in the same building as Missouri Contemporary Ballet, Dande Cafe and the Beach salon.

See you there!

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Speer Morgan and Kris Somerville

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:55:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 6, as Speer Morgan and Kris Somerville discuss the Missouri Review's "Found Text" series featuring previously unpublished work by literary giants of the past, including Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Marianne Moore, Charlotte Bronte, Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner.

SPEER MORGAN

Speer Morgan is a novelist, a University of Missouri professor of English and the editor of The Missouri Review. Morgan has won several awards, including the Best Story of the Year award from Prairie Schooner in 1978, for “Internal Combustion.” He was a fiction fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. He won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1999 for The Freshour Cylinders and a Lawrence Foundation Prize in 2000 for “The Girl.” His story “The Big Bang" received the Goodheart Prize for Shenandoah’s best story of 2008. Morgan has contributed short stories to several other magazines and journals, including Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Northwest Review, New Letters, River Styx, and Iowa Review.

KRIS SOMERVILLE

Kris Somerville teaches literature, publishing and creative writing at Stephens College. Her short stories, essays and prose poems have been published in various magazine, including North American Review, Passages North, Ecotone, River City, Zone 3 and Quarterly West. Her visual and "Found Text" features and omnibus reviews appear regularly in The Missouri Review.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Claire McQuerry and Susan Koenig

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 23, for readings of prose by Susan Koenig and poetry by Claire McQuerry.

CLAIRE MCQUERRY

Claire McQuerry is a Ph.D. candidate in poetry at the University of Missouri and an editor for The Missouri Review. Her poetry collection, Lacemakers, won the Crab Orchard First Book Prize, and her poems and essays have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Mid-American Review, Creation Nonfiction, American Literary Review and other journals.

SUSAN KOENIG

Susan Koenig has written three novels and is working on her fourth. She is a member of a local writing group where she hones her craft in hopes of publication. Her first novel is set in the 1960s and describes the transition of four high school graduates who come of age during the Vietnam conflict, told from the point of view of a young woman making the journey from belief that the war is justified to conviction that it must end. Susan lives in Columbia with her husband.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Michael Nye and Peter Gardner

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 20:56:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9, for readings of prose by Michael Nye and poetry by Peter Gardner.

MICHAEL NYE

Michael Nye’s debut short story collection is Strategies Against Extinction. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review and New South, among many other publications. He is a Columbia resident and works as the managing editor of TheMissouri Review.

PETER GARDNER

After spending his early years in England, Canada, and a Maori community in New Zealand, Peter became an anthropologist with a focus on hunter-gatherers in India and Canada’s Subarctic. He has also studied Hindu civilization and spent time in Japan. Peter has been writing poems since 1966 and personal essays since 2009. His 2006 memoir, Journeys to the Edge, was runner-up for a national award. Orr Street Studios attract him, for he painted in oils as a youth, studied calligraphy in Japan, and entered photography shows in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Seeing Visions with the storm drain artists

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:15:00 +0000

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2, for an evening with the storm drain artists!

Artwork by Lisa Bartlett.

For this year's Roots and Blues festival Thumper Entertainment worked with seven local artists to create awareness among Columbia citizens of the effects of dumping and pollution in our storm drains. The artists painted an original and creative series of storm drains in high traffic areas in The District.

The goal was to educate people on keeping our storm water drains clean, as polluted runoff is the nation's greatest threat to clean water. Come talk to the artists, hear their stories, and see images of the finished works that resulted from this fine community art project.

Learn more!

Mike Sleadd. Photo by Kholood Eid.

Hearing Voices with Lania Knight and Elaine Fowler Palencia

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 17:08:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 25, for readings of prose by Lania Knight and poetry by Elaine Fowler Palencia.

LANIA KNIGHT

Lania Knight's first book, a novella titled Three Cubic Feet, was published by Main Street Rag on August 7, 2012. She has a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, and she currently teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University. Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in New Stories from the Midwest, PANK, Jabberwock Review, and Midwestern Gothic.

You can read more about her at www.laniaknight.com.

ELAINE FOWLER PALENCIA

Elaine Fowler Palencia is the author of six books of fiction and two poetry chapbooks.Her short story collections, Small Caucasian Woman and Brier Country, were published by the University of Missouri Press. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been widely anthologized and have received several awards and four Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in such journals as the American Book Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, Big Muddy, Appalachian Heritage, and Library Journal.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Rachel Hanson and Jamie Ferrugia

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:50:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 4, for readings of prose by Rachel Hanson and poetry by Jamie Ferrugia.

RACHEL HANSON

Rachel Michelle Hanson grew up in Tennessee but has laid roots in the West, where she found a passion for whitewater rafting on the Colorado River and Utah’s Wasatch Range. She earned her MFA from the University of Utah and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Missouri. Her work has appeared in So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Art and Stories South, and she is the former creative nonfiction editor of Quarterly West Literary Journal.

JAMIE FERRUGIA

James O. Ferrugia (Jamie) completed a career in ﬁnancial advisory services before turning his creative energy to songwriting, poetry and prose. His published songs include “Gettin’ What You Wish For Time,” “Ridin’ The Rails” and “Terre Haute.” His ﬁrst published poems, “Deer Season” and “Survivors,” were included in the August 2012 (V.2) issue of Solo Novo (Solopress.org). Jamie and his wife, Susan, live in Callaway County, Missouri, on ten acres of native hardwoods.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

SUMMER VACATION

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:12:00 +0000

Hello, local literati and patrons of the arts!

The Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions series is on hiatus for the summer. Please join us again in August for weekly indulgences in art and literature. Check this site for updates, or join us on Facebook.

Interested in reading your writing or sharing your art in the fall? Contact us at orr.series@gmail.com.

Please stop by Orr Street Studios to meet the artists. The studios are open 12-3 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, by appointment, and for special events. Visit 6-9 p.m. July 20 for Artrageous Friday.

Hearing Voices with Jessie Adolph and Evelyn Somers

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:30:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7:30 p.m.* Tuesday, April 24, for readings of fiction by Evelyn Somers and poetry by Jessie Adolph.

*Note the later start time.

Please join us before the reading for a performance, reading and reception with visiting poet Toi Derricotte, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Berlin Theatre. The theater is located inside Cafe Berlin at 220 North 10th St., one block from Orr Street Studios.

JESSIE ADOLPH

Jessie Adolph earned a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in Africana Studies from Central Missouri State University, where he participated in the McNair Scholarship program. His undergraduate thesis, "Bronzeville: The Chicago Renaissance," was presented at two research conferences, and he was invited to participate in the SREB: Compact for Minority Scholars and Future Faculty Members. At the national Black Graduate Student Conference he presented the paper "Sankofic Rememorization," which examines how hip-hop poets utilize motifs from slave and postslavery oral traditions to reverse the western gaze of othering.

He earned the Kenneth Davis Folklore Award for his essay "The Influence of Black Sermonic Discourse on Black Arts Movement and the Hip-hop Generation."

Adolph has performed original spoken-word poetry at events such as the Missouri Black Expo, and his poetry has appeared in publications including Spokenvizions magazine. He recently wrote the afterword to internationally known poet Jessica Care Moore's latest book, "God Is Not An American."

After a year of teaching in a Columbia public high school, Adolph is returning to his role as a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, where he has taught freshmen composition using hip-hop culture.

EVELYN SOMERS

Evelyn Somers’s fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Crazyhorse, Many Mountains Moving, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Georgia Review and Pank and is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and Cedars.

She has been associate editor of The Missouri Review for more than 20 years.

Books she has edited as a freelancer have won the John Simmons award for short fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Peter Taylor prize for the novel and have been published by both university presses, small presses larger, commercial houses in the United States and abroad.

Somers received a Barbara Deming Foundation grant for her first novel, Preacher’s House, for which she is seeking a publisher. A second novel is in progress.

She recently completed a collection of sometimes eccentric, sometimes feminist stories.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Rachel Patterson and Tori Redmond

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:50:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 10, for readings of poetry by Rachel Patterson and fiction by Tori Redmond.

RACHEL PATTERSON

Rachel Marie Patterson is a Philadelphia native. She's now living in Columbia, Mo., where she's a Ph.D. student in creative writing at the University of Missouri. Her poems have appeared in Fugue, Redivider, The Greensboro Review, Clementine magazine, Tuesday-An Art Project and others. Her first chapbook, If I Am Burning, was released by Main Street Rag in November 2011.

TORI REDMOND

Tori Redmond is a writer living in Dixon, Missouri. Tucked away in acres of dense forest, she tends to steer clear of social settings in favor of more spiritual pursuits. Currently working on her first novel: In The Company of Dogs. She is still working in the soul-sucking world of marketing, but she hopes to engage in more creative pursuits this year and beyond. Her poetry has pretty much appeared crumpled up in corners of her house at this point, but several of her feminist, religious and body-positive rants have been shared far and wide on the 'net.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Anand Prahlad

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:17:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 13, for readings of poetry and prose by Anand Prahlad.

Prahlad is a poet, scholar, educator, musician, songwriter and author of creative non-fiction. His poetry has been published widely in literary journals, and he is the author of two books of poems: Hear My Story and Other Poems and, most recently, As Good as Mango, which was published in February 2012. He has completed another manuscript of poems, Incarnation, and is working on a memoir, titled Getting Happy, Memoir of an African American Autistic.

Prahlad's scholarly publications include Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music, African American Proverbs in Context and the three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore. Prahlad teaches folklore, film and poetry in the English Department at the University of Missouri, where he has been honored with the 2009 Faculty-Alumni Award, the 2010 Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence and inclusion in Nerds of Mizzou.

MEMOIR

Getting Happy: a Memoir of an African American Autistic takes the reader into the world of an African American child with Asperger's syndrome growing up in the 1950s-1970s on a plantation in middle Virginia. Written in a poetic, experimental form, the narrative follows the author as he makes his way through childhood in a rural segregated community, attends college in Virginia and graduate school in California, joins New Age communities such as the Bhagwan Rajneesh spiritual movement, enters the worlds of parenthood and marriage, and becomes a university professor. The main focuses of the memoir are the interior and sensory perceptions of the author and his struggle to make sense of -- and function in -- the neurologically typical world.

Photos by Shane Epping

POETRY

As Good as Mango is a journey told in the sensual language of blues and jazz. It moves from the landscape of colonial Africa into the colonial American South, and into the present. The hauntings of the past come alive with echoes of unclaimed history. The poems in this collection simultaneously affirm and inspect black identity — and identity in general. These are the poems of the bitter/sweet taste on the tongues of exiles searching for home.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Alex George and Tony Mena

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:41:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb 28, for readings of fiction by Alex George and poetry by Tony Mena.

ALEX GEORGE

Alex George is a writer and a lawyer. He was born in England but presently lives in Columbia, Missouri.

Alex has been named as one of Britain's top ten "thirtysomething" novelists by the Times of London, and was also named the Independent on Sunday's "face to watch" for fiction in its Fresh Talent feature.

His most recent novel, A Good American, was published by Penguin Books in February and has received rave reviews.

Alex studied law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris. He moved to the United States in 2003, and re-qualified as a US attorney. He now runs his own law firm in Columbia.

He is proud to be president of the board of the Voluntary Action Center, a leading nonprofit organization in mid-Missouri.

Alex has two young children. His hobbies include listening to obscure jazz albums, playing his saxophone and cooking (and eating) complicated meals.

He is now hard at work on his new novel.

TONY MENA

Gerardo "Tony" Mena is a decorated Iraqi Freedom veteran who spent six years in the Special Operations community with the Reconnaissance Marines as a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman (SARC). During his tour in Iraq he was awarded a Navy Achievement Medal with a V for Valor for multiple acts of bravery.

He is currently a wrestling coach at Hickman High School and is studying at MU to be a high school English teacher. He was awarded the 2011 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Leadership, as well as the 2011 U.S. Bank/Mizzou Student Veterans Association Scholarship.

His poem, "So I Was a Coffin," was the winner of the "2010 War Poetry Contest" sponsored by Winningwriters, and his multimedia version was featured in the online portion of Poets & Writers Magazine. He was selected for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2011 anthology series featuring fifty poems from promising emerging poets. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as a "Best of the Net 2011" award. He won the "2011 Penumbra Haiku Contest" sponsored by the Tallahassee Writers Association. He has poems published in Diagram, Burner Magazine, The Medulla Review, Barely South Review, Spillway, The San Pedro River Review, Sleetmagazine, Protest Poems.org, The New Mexico Poetry Review, a non-fiction essay published on the Veterans Association's website, two songs featured in the Nashville Review, and a third song featured in The Blue Lotus Review.

He has poems and essays forthcoming from Raleigh Review, Prairie Schooner Digital Online Project, Chautaqua, Cider Press Review, Hawai'i Review and War, Literature and the Arts. He has just completed his first full-length manuscript of war poetry.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Keija Parssinen and Thom Dawkins

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:50:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb 14, for readings of fiction by Keija Parssinen and poetry by Thom Dawkins.

KEIJA PARSSINEN

Keija Parssinen was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for 12 years as a third-generation expatriate. She earned a degree in English literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching & Writing Fellowship. She lives with her husband on the edge of a quarry in Columbia, Mo., where she directs the Quarry Heights Writers' Workshop and writes at a desk made of 19th-century Missouri barn wood. The Ruins of Us, Parssinen's debut novel, was published in January 2012 by Harper Perennial in North America and Faber & Faber in the U.K., Ireland, Australia and South Africa. It won a Michener-Copernicus award.

THOM DAWKINS

Thom Dawkins serves as the reviews editor for Weave magazine and contributes regularly to the Los Angeles Review. His recent work as a poet and critic has also appeared in Pleiades, New Orleans Review, DMQ Review and Puerto del Sol. He earned an MFA at Chatham University and studied theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Thom lives in Columbia, Mo., where he teaches poetry and composition.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Seeing Visions with Chris Morrey

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:14:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, for an evening with sculptor Chris Morrey.

Cat 1, bronze, 2010. By Chris Morrey.

CHRIS MORREY

Chris Morrey's bronze sculptures combine plant and animal forms into delicate, primeval, humorous and menacing figures that can seem half-glimpsed and elusive even on close inspection. Since completing his MFA in sculpture at the University of Missouri in 2009, Chris has been building public commissions for the university's new student center, the Boone County Hospital and City Hall and has completed a permanent installation at Missouri Valley College in Marshall. He has also opened Dogwood, a low-cost studio space for local artists in downtown Columbia.

See Chris Morrey's work.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Scott Southwick and Greg Brownderville

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:36:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 31, for readings of fiction by Scott Southwick and poetry by Greg Brownderville.

GREG BROWNDERVILLE

Greg Alan Brownderville, a native of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas, is the author of one collection of poems, Gust (Northwestern University Press, 2011). He has received a Porter Fund poetry prize, a Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Voice-Only Poetry prize from The Missouri Review and the University of Nebraska’s Jane Geske Award, among other accolades. His work is published regularly in periodicals such as Prairie Schooner, the Oxford American and Gravy. He earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Mississippi in 2008, and he currently teaches creative writing at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo.

SCOTT SOUTHWICK

Scott Southwick invented one of the pioneering search engines, Liszt.com, sold it before the dot-com bubble burst, squandered most of the money, and then used the last of it to open Sparky's Ice Cream. Along the way his short fiction has appeared in journals such as Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train Stories and the current issue of The New England Review.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Marc McKee and Debra Brenegan

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:26:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 6, for readings of fiction by Debra Brenegan and poetry by Marc McKee.

DEBRA BRENEGAN

Debra Brenegan grew up in the Milwaukee area and graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She worked as a journalist and taught at Milwaukee Area Technical College before beginning her graduate work. She earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also taught. She teaches English and Women’s Studies at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. For her fiction, she has received a Ragdale residency and was a recent finalist for the John Gardner Memorial Fiction Prize, The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Prose Prize, and the Crab Creek Review Fiction Prize. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Calyx, Tampa Review, Natural Bridge, The Laurel Review, RE:AL, The Southern Women’s Review, The Cimarron Review, Milwaukee Magazine, Phoebe, and other publications. Debra Brenegan’s novel, Shame the Devil, is a historical account of nineteenth-century American writer Fanny Fern (SUNY Press, Excelsior Editions). She is currently working on another novel, set in Missouri, and on a short story collection.

MARC MCKEE

Marc McKee holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His work has appeared in various journals, such as Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, LIT, and Pleiades. His chapbook, What Apocalypse?, won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest, and his full-length collection, Fuse, is out now from Black Lawrence Press.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Stephanie Kartalopoulos and Stacey Lynn Brown

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:19:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 8, for readings of poetry by Stephanie Kartalopoulos and Stacey Lynn Brown.

STACEY LYNN BROWN

Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at Emory University, Oxford University, and The University of Oregon, where she received her MFA in poetry. A poet, playwright, and essayist, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, The Cortland Review, Natural Bridge, Sou’wester, and The Southern Quarterly, as well as the anthology From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Her book-length poem in sections, Cradle Song, was published by C&R Press in January, 2009. Poems from Cradle Song have won awards from The Poetry Center of Chicago and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, where she lives with her husband, poet Adrian Matejka, and their daughter.

STEPHANIE KARTALOPOULOS

Stephanie Kartalopoulos is a creative writing fellow in poetry at the University of Missouri, where she also is studying toward a PhD in creative writing and literature. She holds an MFA In creative writing from the University of Florida and a BA in English from Harvard and has taught at Boston University, Lesley University, the educational non-profit Year Up, Cambridge College and The University of Florida in addition to Mizzou. Stephanie's poems appear in and are forthcoming from a variety of journals that include 32 Poems, Phoebe, Harpur Palate, Waccamaw, Barn Owl Review, Subtropics, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Fifth Wednesday and St. Katherine's Review.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices with Sarah Heston and Jim Coppoc

noreply@blogger.com (Orr St.'s Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Series) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:44:00 +0000

Join us at Orr Street Studios Tuesday, Oct. 11, for readings of nonfiction by Sarah Heston and poetry by Jim Coppoc.

Sarah Heston

Sarah Heston earned an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine in 2003 and has since published chapters of her current project, a memoir, in Hotel Amerika and American Literary Review. She is also the recipient of the 2009 Eda Kriseova Fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Prague Summer Program and the Mizzou Creative Writing Program 2011 Nonfiction Award. She is working on a Ph.D. in nonfiction at the University of Missouri.

Jim Coppoc

Jim Coppoc makes his living through some murky but evolving balance of poetry, pedagogy, playwriting, music and performance. In addition to his long history on spoken word and music stages, Coppoc recently has been getting a lot of good attention from the literary world, with four Pushcart nominations this year alone. Among other projects, Coppoc teaches English and American Indian Studies at Iowa State University; teaches poetry and spoken word in Chatham University's low-residency MFA in Writing program; serves as music coordinator for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames; plays bass in the Gatehouse Saints; and lives in Ames, Iowa with his wife and two sons.