Event Report – Thomas Sayers Ellis

Poet Thomas Sayers Ellis read to nearly a hundred people in the Hill Auditorium on 20 March 2008 in an event cosponsored by the New Writing Series and the Honors College. In his forty-minute set, Ellis read from his book The Maverick Room and from a manuscript in progress (see set list below). The poet also took questions from the audience. The event, introduced by Steve Evans, was recorded on digital videotape (vhs and dvd duplicates available soon).

Next Up – Rodney Koeneke & Benjamin Friedlander

The UMaine New Writing Series continues this Thursday, 3 April, with a poetry reading by Rodney Koeneke and Benjamin Friedlander at 4:30pm in the Soderberg “cube” (Jenness Hall).

BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER is the author of The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes, Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism, and Time Rations, among many other volumes. He recently edited the Selected Poems of Robert Creeley for the University of California Press. Friedlander is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine and a member of the National Poetry Foundation editorial collective. Read more about him here.

RODNEY KOENEKE is the author of Rouge State and Musée Mechanique. His new manuscript is called “Etruria.” He lives in Portland with his wife, Lesley Poirier, and their curly-headed son, and tends a blog called Modern Americans. This will be Koeneke’s first appearance in the New Writing Series.

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Listen to tracks from previous NWS events on UMaine’s iTunes U.
On Facebook? You’re invited to join the NWS group.
Keep track of NWS events via LibraryThing Local.
To learn more about the National Poetry Foundation, visit the new website.
For more about the English Department, which offers Master’s Degrees in Creative Writing and Poetry & Poetics, click here.

Event Report – Rivera & Moxley

Poets Eléna Rivera and Jennifer Moxley read to a capacity audience in the Soderberg Auditorium on 20 March 2008. Both writers read from work in manuscript (set lists below). The event was recorded on digital videotape (vhs and dvd duplicates available soon), on lo-fi audio (8-bit wav) and hi-fi audio (thanks to Rebecca Griffin). Benjamin Costanzi’s recap of the event for the Maine Campus is online here.

Up next – Thomas Sayers Ellis

The New Writing Series, in proud partnership with the UMaine Honors College, is pleased to welcome poet Thomas Sayers Ellis to campus for a reading this Wednesday, 26 March, at 4:30pm in the Arthur Hill Auditorium (Barrows Hall). This event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited.

THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1988 and earned a M.F.A. from Brown University in 1995. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Grand Street, Tin House, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry, 1997 and 2001. He has received fellowships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. Mr. Ellis is a contributing editor to Callaloo and Poets and Writers and a frequent contributor to WaxPoetics. In 2005 he was awarded a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers’ Award. His first, full collection, The Maverick Room, was published by Graywolf Press in 2005 and awarded The 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. He is also the author of The Good Junk (Take Three #1, Graywolf 1996); a chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001) and the chaplet Song On (WinteRed Press 2005). Ellis is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and a faculty member of The Lesley University low-residency M.F.A program (Cambridge, Massachusetts). His Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series. For more about Ellis, visit his homepage.

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In addition to bookmarking our blog, we hope you’ll check out the NWS on LibraryThing local here. You can join our Facebook groups here (global) and here (local).

Event Report – Stephen Cope and Catherine Taylor

A full Soderberg Auditorium greeted poet Stephen Cope and experimental essayist Catherine Taylor for the third event of the spring 2008 NWS. Cope read from his latest manuscript, “The Bellerophonic Letter,” including several provocative poems such as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Assassination of a President,” while Taylor read engaging excerpts from her latest hybrid genre essay “Duffer’s Drift.”

NWS now on LibraryThing Local

We’ve added the New Writing Series to the map of local literary venues now provided by the excellent library cataloging site LibraryThing (founded in Portland, Maine, by Tim Spalding). Have a look—and while you’re online, consider joining our Facebook group, here (local) and here (global).

Next Up – Eléna Rivera & Jennifer Moxley

Poets Eléna Rivera and Jennifer Moxley will read on Thursday, 20 March, at 4:30pm in the Cube.