Alberto Giacometti

Join us at the next Seeing Visions at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 22, to view and discuss a film about the artist Alberto Giacometti.

The work of Alberto Giacometti can be characterized as existentialist meditations on the human body. His stance against surrealism in favor of figuration was of great importance during a time when surrealism was reigning. After hardships stalled his career, Giacometti began creating disturbingly small statues and reportedly left Geneva in 1940 with his entire body of work in a matchbox. The Swiss painter and sculptor followed with one of the most important creative periods of any 20th-century artist, where he created his tall, thin sculptures, often categorized as existential reality.

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

Josh Whitt and Marissa Fugate

Join us for readings of fiction by Marissa Fugate and poetry by Josh Whitt at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 15, at Orr Street Studios.

MARISSA FUGATE

Marissa Fugate is a student in the English PhD program at the University of Missouri, focusing on contemporary world literature and the representations of violence in works from places of long-term ethnic conflict. She earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Arkansas. Her work can be found in Babble, Fugue and The Oxford American. 

JOSH WHITT

Josh Whitt is an author and IT nerd from St. Louis, and why not?  His work has appeared in Bellerive, Skive magazine and various Web journals.

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

MISSOURI HISTORY NIGHT with Jim Muench and Arthur Merhoff

Hearing Voices presents a Missouri history theme night at 7 p.m. March 1 at Orr Street Studios in Columbia, Mo. 

Jim Muench will read from his manuscript The Teutonic Cross, a historical novel set in a Missouri college town in 1913, and Arthur Mehrhoff will read from Coming Home Again: A Missouri Journal, a nonfiction book about the meaning of Missouri's special places.

JIM MUENCH

Jim Muench is an author, free-lance journalist, public relations consultant and college instructor who lives in Columbia. His history book, Five Stars:  Missouri’s Most Famous Generals, was published in 2006 by the University of Missouri Press. 

His career includes 25 years of professional experience writing in various genres, and his work has been published in newspapers, magazines and literary publications on local, regional and national levels in publications such as Missouri Life, Sports Illustrated for Kids and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His award-winning play, The Eye of the Sun, received staged readings at two Missouri colleges.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in English/creative writing from Westminster College and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he served as science writer for the MU News Bureau and then as director of communications at Westminster College, the Missouri Division of Energy and the Missouri Department of Economic Development. He started a freelance writing and public relations consulting business in 2001 and has been teaching English at Columbia College and Westminster College since 2007.

ARTHUR MEHRHOFF

W. Arthur Mehrhoff is the academic coordinator for the Museum of Art & Archaeology at the University of Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in urban affairs from Washington University in St. Louis and a doctorate in American Studies, with an emphasis in material culture studies, from St. Louis University. For 15 years he served as community relations coordinator and chair of the award-winning Minnesota Design Team, and he received a Distinguished Service Award from the Minnesota chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

He was a keynote speaker for the June 2003 National Trust for Historic Preservation “Your Town” workshop in West Virginia, the 2007 Minnesota Rural Summit and the 2008 Canadian Institute of Planning conference.

Mehrhoff created the Heritage Preservation Program and taught community design and heritage preservation for 15 years at the Minnesota State University in Saint Cloud. He served as a guest lecturer in American culture studies at Washington University and teaches an online course on community design for University of Missouri Architectural Studies. His article on cultural tourism is featured in the Encyclopedia of Urban America: Cities and Suburbs (ABC-Clio, 1998), and in 2008 he received a certificate of merit for cultural writing from the International Regional Magazine Association.

Cave Canem Reading at Mizzou

As part of the University of Missouri's Black History Month celebration, award-winning poet Cornelius Eady, MU professor of English and founder of the black poets organization Cave Canem, reads his work with special guest Cave Canem poets Natasha Ria El-Scari, Aisha Sharif and Glenn North. Two finalists from the MU student open-mic spoken word competition also will perform.

The reading begins at 7 p.m. in Stotler Lounge III, Memorial Union, on the University of Missouri campus.

CORNELIUS EADY

Cornelius Eady is a poet, playwright and songwriter. He is a professor of English and the Miller Family Chair at the University of Missouri. His poetry collections include Hardheaded Weather (Marian Wood/Putnam, 2008) and Brutal Imagination (Marian Wood/Putnam 2001), which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Awards. With the poet Toi Derricotte, he is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation.


GLENN NORTH
Glenn North is currently a poet in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is a Cave Canem fellow, a Callaloo creative writing fellow and a recent recipient of the Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist award. Glenn provided the poetic narration for the award-winning film short May This Be Love and had a guest appearance on the popular ABC family drama Lincoln Heights. He is also the Poet-in-Residence of the American Jazz Museum, where he facilitates poetry writing and performance workshops and hosts the popular monthly open-mic poetry competition Jazz Poetry Jams. 

AISHA SHARIF
Aisha Sharif received her MFA in poetry from Indiana University in Bloomington. Much of her poetry and nonfiction explores how religious and gender identities intersect. Her poetry has appeared in Muslim Wakeup!, Touchstone Literary Journal,  Poemmemoirstory, Callaloo and Mythium. She is a proud Cave Canem fellow and teaches English at Park University and Johnson County Community College. She currently lives in Merriam, Kansas.

NATASHA RIA EL-SCARI
Natasha Ria El-Scari is a spoken-word artist and writer, a member of the Black Poets Collective of Kansas City, a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry workshop facilitator. Her writing has been published in Black Magnolias, I Woke Up and Put My Crown On: The Project of 76 Voices, Family Pictures and Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Emcees and Poets. She has has performed at numerous Kansas City area venues and at universities throughout the United States. She holds a master’s degree in liberal studies from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Amina Gautier and John Nieves

Fiction writer Amina Gautier and poet John Nieves read their work at 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at Orr Street Studios.  

Amina Gautier

Amina Gautier is the 2010 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award. Her short story collection, At-Risk, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September 2011. More than 60 of Gautier's stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Pleiades and Southern Review. Her work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Ucross Residency and Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, the Danahy Fiction Prize and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

John Nieves

John A. Nieves’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Redivider, Fugue, Minnesota Review, Adirondack Review, SLAB, New Mexico Poetry Review, California Quarterly and Florida Review. He received the Charles Conway Memorial Award at the Florida Suncoast Writers’ Conference, earned the Estelle J. Zbar Poetry Prize and won the 2010 Southeast Review AWP Short Poetry Contest. He is currently a doctoral student enrolled in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri.

FEB. 1 READING CANCELED

Because of the impending "snowpocalypse," "historic weather event" and/or "epic winter storm" (a lot of snow), we'll have to cancel the Feb. 1 reading and reschedule Jim and Christina for May. Stay tuned for details!

Hearing Voices starts Feb. 1 at 7 pm

THE FEB. 1 READING HAS BEEN CANCELED BECAUSE OF AN IMPENDING BLIZZARD. WE'LL RESCHEDULE FOR MAY. STAY TUNED!

Our first reading of the spring 2011 semester features poet Jim Coffman and creative nonfiction writer Christina Ingoglia.

Christina Ingoglia

Christina Ingoglia is a creative nonfiction writer and a full-time instructor of creative writing and composition at Columbia College.

Ingoglia’s writing has appeared in the Copper Nickel, Inside Columbia and Prime magazine. Currently she is at work on a collection of essays titled “These Strange Heavens.”

Ingoglia earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming in 2009. Before going to graduate school, she was a professional union organizer. 

 

Jim Coffman

Jim Coffman’s Gravel Dust and Dreams, a poetry collection about growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s in east-central Illinois, was published in 2009 by Pudding House Publications. A sequel, Outside the Crowd, was published in 2010. His poetic works have appeared in several journals and anthologies since 2005.

Coffman retired after 40 years of ministry. Besides weekly sermons, he authored Communicate in Word and Deed for the United Church Press and Finding Myself in the Parables for The Christian Board of Publication.

He and his wife, Jan, an art photographer, are active in the Missouri Writers Guild.