Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Dec. 17: Marlene Lee, Khem K. Aryal and Danielle Langdon

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 17, for fiction by Marlene Lee, fiction by Khem K. Aryal and graphic design by Danielle Langdon.  

Photo by Don Shrubshell/Columbia Daily Tribune

MARLENE LEE
When she’s not reading, playing the piano, or studying French with Antoine, Marlene Lee holds down a table at the Lakota Coffee House in Columbia, little city of writers, confronting blank pages during business hours and postponing the inevitable with another cup of coffee.

Before writing full time, she carted her stenotype machine from place to place in a moveable feast of court reporting. Before court reporting she taught high school, children’s special education, freshman and sophomore college English, and vocational school classes in stenotype theory. Always and in-between, she was writing short stories and novels.

Two of Marlene Lee’s books were published by Holland House in 2013: The Absent Woman and a collection of short stories called Rebecca’s Road.

Three Blind Mice, a collection of three mystery novellas, will be published spring of 2014 under the Grey Cells Press imprint, and Limestone Wall, a novel, in fall of the same year, by Holland House Books.

KHEM K. ARYAL
Khem K. Aryal is the author of Epic Teashop (Vajra Books, Kathmandu, 2009) and Kathmandu Saga And Other Poems (Society of Nepali Writers in English, Nepal, 2004). His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Qwerty Magazine, Poydras Review, Of Nepalese Clay, The Kathmandu Post, etc.. A PhD candidate in creative writing (fiction) and composition at the University of Missouri, he is currently working on a collection of short stories, The Displaced, and a novel, Outsiders in Indonesia.

DANIELLE LANGDON
A highly motivated person who is inexplicably drawn to dancing, Danielle Langdon graduated manga cum laude from Ursinus College in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in media communications studies and dance. Successively she travelled abroad before returning to Princeton, NJ, to work for an architectural design firm, HDR Inc. Danielle is currently working toward her master's degree in graphic design at the University of Missouri. Her greatest design accomplishment to date is the redesign of the MU Libraries website, which will be completed in 2014. Danielle’s greatest geek accomplishment to date is the completion of her seventh scrapbook.

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

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Nov. 19: Chad Simpson, Scott Garson, Bonnie Chasteen

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, for fiction by Chad Simpson, fiction by Scott Garson and paintings by Bonnie Chasteen.

SCOTT GARSON
Scott Garson is the author of Is That You, John Wayne?, a collection of stories, and American Gymnopedies, a book of microfictions. His fiction has won awards from Playboy, The Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation and Dzanc Books, and he has work in or coming from Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Hobart, Conjunctions, New York Tyrant and other publications. He edits the Pushcart-Prize-winning journal of very short fiction Wigleaf.

CHAD SIMPSON
Chad Simpson is the author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi, is the winner of the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award and has been published by the University of Iowa Press. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Rumpus, American Short Fiction and New Stories from the Midwest 2012, among other publications. He is the recipient of awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Illinois Arts Council. He lives in Monmouth, Illinois, and is an associate professor of English at Knox College.

BONNIE CHASTEEN
Bonnie Chasteen grew up in a little mill town west of Asheville, North Carolina, where she spent summers helping her family raise vegetables and butcher chickens. She showed an early talent for drawing and painting but turned to literature and writing in high school. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from UNC-Charlotte and an master's degree in creative writing from Purdue University. While she has worked with words most of her life (she is an editor with the Missouri Department of Conservation), she has always sought out courses, workshops and tutorials with local artists wherever she has lived. Locally, she has studied with or painted alongside Naomi Sugino, Jane Mudd, Frank Stack, Byron Smith and Gloria Gaus, among other artists. In her paintings and drawings, she looks for a fresh, expressive view of the ordinary, whether it is the human face, people at work, landscapes, or still lifes. Her drawings, pastels and paintings have appeared in the Frame Garden Gallery in Livingston, Montana, and in the Bingham Gallery on the University of Missouri campus. Her first solo show is currently on exhibit in the gallery at Orr Street Studios.

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

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Oct. 15: Anne-Marie Thompson, Lauren Fath, Katherine Koch

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 15, for poetry by Anne-Marie Thompson, creative nonfiction by Lauren Fath and paintings by Katherine Koch.

ANNE-MARIE THOMPSON

Anne-Marie Thompson teaches at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. Her first book, Audiation, won the 2013 Donald Justice Prize. Recent work appears in Birmingham Poetry Review, Southeast Review, Southwest Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor of music in piano performance from Texas Christian University.

LAUREN FATH

Lauren Fath is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Missouri, where she holds the Creative Writing Program Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Post Road, First Inkling and the South Loop Review, is forthcoming in poemmemoirstory and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

KATHERINE KOCH


Katherine Koch, a Brooklyn-based visual artist and educator, earned a master's degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts. She has shown her paintings extensively in the United States and in Europe, most notably in solo and group exhibitions with the Arlene Bujese Gallery (East Hampton, NY) and the Benton Gallery (Southampton, NY). Her work has been commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has won residencies at the Byrdcliffe Artists Colony in Woodstock, NY, and the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, Va. She has worked collaboratively with writers, musicians and theater artists.

Koch has taught visual arts in a wide range of media (including murals, artists’ books, art history studies and community-based projects) to underserved students in New York City schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative and New York City Ballet and has developed multi-year residencies at schools outside the city. She has also taught studio art and art history at William Paterson University and at Eugene Lang College.

She is currently writing a memoir about growing up surrounded by New York School poets and artists in Greenwich Village in the 1960s.

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Sept. 24: Steve Schroeder, Jill Orr, Scott McMahon

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions at Orr Street Studios is back!

This semester we're combining visual arts and literary arts into one big monthly multisensory extravaganza: two readings, one art talk, Q-and-A sessions and, of course, an intermission with wine.

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24, for the first installment of the fall 2013 season of Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions at Orr Street Studios. We'll showcase creative nonfiction by Jill Orr, poetry by Steve Schroeder and photography by Scott McMahon.

Steve Schroeder
Steven D. Schroeder’s second book is The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press, 2013), and his first book was Torched Verse Ends. His poetry is available from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, The Journal, Barrow Street, and Verse Daily. Pieces have also appeared by invitation in city parks, public transportation, and business waiting rooms. He edits the online poetry journal Anti-, serves as co-curator for Observable Readings and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer.

Jill Orr
Jill Orr is a writer and stay-at-home mother of two. In her pre-mommy days, she graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in social work -- but wishes she had gotten her PhD in What's For Dinner and How to Get Bubblegum out of the Carpet. Might have served her better. She writes a parenting column for Columbia Home magazine and personal essays on her blog, An Exercise in Narcissism. She is also writes romantic comedy novels that she hopes will one day sell and eliminate the need for her ever to get a real job again.

Scott McMahon

The Letters Project

Scott McMahon earned an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and a BFA in photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He recently completed an artist-in-residence program at Border Art Residency in La Union, N.M. His work has been published in Pinhole Photography, Rediscovering a Historic Technique by Eric Renner, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James and the forthcoming book Anthotype – The Darkroom in your Garden by Malin Fabbri. Scott shows his work nationally and internationally and teaches classes and workshops on historic photographic processes. He is currently an assistant professor of art at Columbia College.

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

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions is on hiatus for the summer. Join us in September when we merge the two series (potentially tearing a hole in the space–time continuum) into one big monthly literary/visual arts extravaganza!

Tuesday, Sept. 10

Orr Street Studios will host a special event for the Daniel Boone Regional Library's One Read community reading program. The 2013 selection is The Ruins of Us by Columbia's own Keija Parssinen!

Tuesday, Sept. 24

We'll kick off the fall 2013 Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions series with our first hybrid Voices/Visions event. Prepare to be wowed.

Hearing Voices with Anne Barngrover and Marlene Lee

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

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

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

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

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.