Thursday, January 19, 2012

Discovering SHR: A Master Class and Reading

We're very proud to have received funding from the Alabama State Council on the Arts to host two of our Pushcart Prize nominees--Emma Bolden and Alison Pelegrin--here in Auburn for a master class and reading. Both events are free and open to the public.

DISCOVERING SHR, as we've called the event, will run all day on Saturday, February 11.

Meet Alison Pelegrin
Alison will be running a master class on poetry, from 10:00-12:00.  A description of her class is coming soon.  In the meantime, do check out her incredible bio:

Poet, essayist, and teacher Alison Pelegrin is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press: Hurricane Party (2011) and Big Muddy River of Stars (2007), which won the Akron Poetry Prize, as well as The Zydeco Tablets (Word Press, 2002), and three chapbooks. Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily and The Writer's Almanac. She earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas, and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. A resident of the New Orleans area for most of her life, she currently resides in Covington, Louisiana with her family.  

Emma Bolden


Emma Bolden's class, running from 1:00-3:00 pm, will be: 

Thinking Nonfiction: Putting Your World on the Page with Emma Bolden

  “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”  – Joan Didion
 
The art of creative nonfiction isn't solely about documenting the facts of a life; it’s the art of thinking itself, of making sense of your own world and your own life and finding a way to convey that to others.  It's the art of creating that world in words, finding a way to make it so real that your readers can inhabit it with you.  It's the art of finding your voice, a way of putting together words and images and creating moments that is absolutely, uniquely yours. In this workshop, we’ll cover the basics of nonfiction writing and practice ways to make our memories speak to the page.

Emma's bio:

Emma Bolden is the author of  How To Recognize A Lady, a chapbook of poems published as part of Edge by Edge, the third in Toadlily Press’ Quartet Series; The Mariner’s Wife, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press; and The Sad Epistles, published by Dancing Girl Press.  She was the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and was named a Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation/Poetry magazine. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University.


Both classes will be held at St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church, here in Auburn, at 136 East Magnolia Avenue.

We'll also host a reading after the classes at 6 p.m. at The Gnu's Room, 414 South Gay Street in Auburn.

Do plan on joining us for this all day event.  NOTE:  CLASS SIZES ARE LIMITED, so sign up ahead of time by emailing Karen at shrengl@auburn.edu.

Again, our thanks to the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Department of English at Auburn University and the College of Liberal Arts for their support of SHR.