Melody Gee, Phong Nguyen + Sarah Nguyen, Aarik Danielsen + Amy Wilder

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 15, for poetry by Melody Gee, fiction by Phong Nguyen, paintings and illustrations by Sarah Nguyen and arts journalism by Aarik Danielsen and Amy Wilder.

MELODY GEE
Melody S. Gee is the author of Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press 2010), which won the Perugia Book Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Boxcar Poetry Review and Connotation Press. She teaches writing at St. Louis Community College and lives in St. Louis with her husband and daughters.



PHONG NGUYEN

Phong Nguyen is editor of Pleiades and author of Memory Sickness and Other Stories. He directs the Unsung Masters Series, for which he edited the volume Nancy Hale: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master. Nguyen teaches fiction and American literature at the University of Central Missouri, where he lives with his wife, the artist Sarah Nguyen, and their three children.

SARAH NGUYEN
Sarah Nguyen is a painter living and working in rural Missouri. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibits throughout the United States, including galleries in Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City and New York City. She earned a BFA in illustration from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in painting from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She works as an art instructor at the University of Central Missouri.

AARIK DANIELSEN

Aarik Danielsen is the features editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune. There, he has the privilege of writing and assigning stories about the things which matter most to him: culture and community. A native of the Southwest, he migrated to Missouri to study music at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar. Finding that the Midwest suited him, he remained, later earning a master's degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. Since coming to the Tribune in 2009, he has enjoyed opportunities to interview regionally and nationally recognized artists and musicians who create on scales both intimate and immense. His greatest joy as a journalist has come through chances to more deeply understand the particular passions of culture-makers, then convey those concerns in thoughtful and creative ways.

AMY WILDER
Amy Wilder is a features writer at the Columbia Daily Tribune and, since July 2012, has written stories profiling local artists and arts events, as well as the occasional visiting professional or musician. Amy was born in Columbia and raised in Fayette and attended the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, where she wrote her own degree, a BFA in visual culture, graduating in 2003. In addition to writing for the Tribune, Amy occasionally composes poetry and fiction (usually under a nom de plume), sells a painting now and then, dreams up performance-art pieces, plays clarinet and piano and enjoys listening to music. She has an avid interest in physics, engineering, mathematics and aviation. She's especially intrigued by the growing intersection between the arts and sciences, and potential applications of interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

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.