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.

Hearing Voices with Elizabeth Hatmaker and J. Bowers

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.