Winter Break

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

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

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Nov. 6, as Speer Morgan and Kris Somerville discuss the Missouri Review's "Found Text" series featuring previously unpublished work by literary giants of the past, including Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Marianne Moore, Charlotte Bronte, Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner.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

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

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

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.

• Roots N Blues: Storm Drain Art
• Crawl Brings Awareness to Storm Drains
•  Mid-Missouri artists to educate with downtown storm drain murals
• Artists decorate downtown Columbia stormwater drains

Hearing Voices with Lania Knight and Elaine Fowler Palencia

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.