Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Writers Series This Fall? Not So Much
Posted by Leonard Gill on Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:46 PM
Over at Rhodes College, there's, so far, one visiting-author event slated, and it's Thursday, September 17th. That's when the college will host not one but three returning alumnae -- Christina LaPrease, Aisha Sharif, and Caki Wilkinson -- who will read from their poetry starting at 7:30 p.m. in Blount Auditorium inside Buckman Hall.
A little background on the poets:
LaPrease, who graduated from Rhodes in 2006, earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2008. Her poetry was recently adapted for the stage at the Bowery Poetry Club in lower Manhattan and for New York's conceptually based performance outfit FluxConcert. Today she lives in New York and works at the Academy of American Poets.
Sharif (Rhodes, '03) received her MFA from Indiana University-Bloomington, where she served as an instructor of creative writing. In addition to her work appearing in various journals, Sharif in 2006 received the Touchstone Graduate Poetry Award.
After graduating from Rhodes in 2003, Wilkinson went on to Johns Hopkins, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, and Yale Review. In 2008, she received the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Wilkinson is now pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Cincinnati.
The reading at Rhodes is free and open to the public. Questions? Call 843-3794.
Comments (7)
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This is a sorry state of affairs, indeed. The River City Writers Series is one of the very best offerings from the UofM, for both students and the community. PLEASE let university movers and shakers know how disappointed we are!
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You're so right that it is a sad state of affairs. Unfortunately money just doesn't seem to flow quite as easily into the halls of Patterson as it does a few blocks to the north. Still, we do have a few writers coming through town this fall, at least one under the moniker of RCWS. Robert Root will be reading on October 1st in Mitchell Hall at 7pm.
Robert Root is co-author of The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction and author of E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist, Wordsmithery, and Working at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing. His essays have been published in The North Dakota Quarterly, The Dunes Review, The Rockhurst Review, and elsewhere. He teaches nonfiction, editing, and composition at Central Michigan University.
Call me crazy, but there's probably a lot of writers out there who would do the River City Writers series for free. Time it when they're doing a swing through town on a book tour. You probably won't get the two or three day event, with workshops and whatnot, that the series usually offers to students, but at least you'd get the exposure.
That may be true, Jeff, but generally, writers coming through town on tour are committed to whatever bookstore is bringing them in, often there is a contractual obligation to only appear in one spot. Also, amazingly, The University charges for the use of almost all the rooms on campus where one might host a reading, and, then dining services charges for setting up a water station, or whatever. So, just because we might be able to successfully ask artists to give of their time for free (something that is very common, and frequently annoying, as if an artist's time is not worth much), that doesn't really mitigate the expense of having an event. If you've ever been to a reading in Patterson 456 (the multi-purpose aka Free room), you'll know that it's not exactly inspiring (to the artist or the audience).
Anyone want to hold a bake sale for RCWS?!
I've never been asked to sign a contract to do a book signing. Granted, I haven't had many, but nobody ever asked me to do that. But I had no idea you had to pay the University for the use of a room. If they won't give you money to sponsor the series, and then turn around and charge you money to hold an event, that's just wrong.
I suppose it may not be common to do contracts, but I think there is a sort of tacit agreement that any books sold will come through the bookstore, does that make sense? On campus, any books sold would have to go through the University bookstore.
Regardless, I think the RCWS will rise again. It's so true that it's an asset to our community, and certainly to the students. Just in the past couple of years we've had Pulitzer prize winners, National Book Award winners, poets, journalists, novelists, nonfictionists . . . a really great collection.
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