Scott Dalrymple | Rich Smith | Shane Epping

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18, for science fiction by Scott Dalrymple, poetry by Rich Smith and photography by Shane Epping.

SCOTT DALRYMPLE 

Scott Dalrymple is the president of Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri. He grew up in in a small town in the western part of upstate New York. He worked in traditional liberal-arts-and-sciences colleges and spent four years as a dean at Excelsior College, an online-only institution in Albany, New York, before coming to Columbia.

Along with a master’s degree in business administration, Dalrymple has a PhD, a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in English, with specialties in Mark Twain, Shakespeare and turn-of the-century American novels. As dean of Excelsior College, Dalrymple encouraged the creation of English courses on zombies, and later, a course about vampires.

In 2010, Dalrymple earned Realms of Fantasy magazine’s Readers Choice Award for his short science-fiction piece “Queen of the Kanguellas,” which features sorcery and a tribe led by an immortal warrior queen. He has published several works of fiction in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.

 

RICH SMITH
 
Rich Smith is the author All Talk (Poor Claudia, 2014) and the chapbook Great Poem of Desire and Other Poems (Poor Claudia, 2013). His poems have appeared or will soon appear in Tin House, City Arts, Guernica, The Southeast Review, Hobart, Barrow Street, The Bellingham Review, Pleiades, Verse Daily and elsewhere.

He was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Prize.

A native of Belton, Missouri, Smith is a poetry editor of Pleiades and the visiting professor of poetry at the University of Central Missouri.

SHANE EPPING
 
Shane Epping works as a photographer and adjunct faculty member at the University of Missouri, where learning about photojournalism as a graduate student saved him from continually wondering, “What if I did what I really wanted to do with my life?”

Epping began his formal photography education at the age of 32, after working as a high school teacher and wrestling coach for six years. He has a passion for telling stories. Employed to support his educational institution, he manages to compliment traditional public-relations work with documentary storytelling.
 
Epping holds a master's degree in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism, a master’s degree in American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Chicago.

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