MFA Candidate Launches New Journal

First-year MFA Candidate Naomi Washer has launched the inaugural issue of Ghost Proposal, a new online journal of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction.

Though currently closed for submissions, Ghost Proposal wants "your word memories like bathing suits that don't fit," and "seeks to represent a wide range of brain activity and circuitry in poetry, creative nonfiction, and multimedia."  Please click here to give Issue #1 a read.  Congratulations, Naomi!

33 Reading Series: Upcoming Fall Events featuring Erin Wisti, Matt Cwiklinski, & Louise LeBourgeois

Maddison Hamil Featured in Marginalia

Marginalia, Columbia's graduate student-centered blog (and featuring the writing of our own Jennifer Tatum-Cotamagaña) sets its sights this week on MFA Candidate Maddison Hamil.  Click here to give it a read!

THE 33 READING SERIES: APRIL 19TH

WES JAMISON is an MFA Nonfiction candidate, Follett Fellow, and Graduate Student Instructor at Columbia College Chicago. His essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 1913: a Journal of Forms, Columbia Poetry Review, and South Loop Review: Creative Nonfiction + Art. He appreciates three-sentence bios for their poetic roundness, but is reminded that he is writing his bio, not a poem.

SARA PECK hails from south of the Mason-Dixon where people make proper sweet tea and know what kind of food grits are. When not studying the poetics of the Black Mountain School, you can find Sara participating in one of her many worldly hobbies such as making vegan snacks, haunting the Rainbo Club, and appreciating a good mustache. 

JENNIFER TATUM-COTAMAGAÑA's poems and essays are published and or forthcoming in 1913: a journal of forms, Columbia Poetry Review and South Loop Review's Creative Nonfiction + Art Online. From California, by way of Texas, she blogs, teaches, writes and makes breakfast for dinner. She is also in complete denial that Ryann Wahl is moving to New York City.

RYANN WAHL is a native of the Midwest and currently lives in Chicago, though tragically not for much longer.  After completing her MFA from Columbia College Chicago, she will move to the Big Apple to pursue one of her many talents, which include but are not limited to: securing seating at busy bars, hosting excellent parties, and, of course, writing lovely poems.

Robin Hemley Reading 4/17

Columbia College Chicago Presents

a Creative Writing-Nonfiction Program Event

Sponsored by the Department of English in the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences:

A reading by ROBIN HEMLEY

Hokin Hall
623 S. Wabash Ave., Room 109
Tuesday, April 17, 5:30p.m.
The event is free and open to the public.
 

Photo: Catherine Segurson
   

ROBIN HEMLEY is the author of eight books of nonfiction and fiction and the winner of many awards including a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from the Chicago Tribune, The Story Magazine Humor Prize, an Independent Press Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes and many others.  His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and elsewhere and he frequently teaches creative writing workshops around the world.  He has been widely anthologized and has published his work in such places as The New York Times, Orion, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, and many of the finest literary magazines in the U.S.  The BBC is currently developing a feature film based on his book Invented Eden that tells the story of a purported anthropological hoax in the Philippines.  His popular craft book Turning Life Into Fiction has sold over 60,000 copies in its lifetime. His third collection of short stories, Reply All, is forthcoming in 2012 from Indiana University Press (Break Away Books) and The University of Georgia Press will publish his book A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel, also in 2012. He is a Senior Editor of The Iowa Review as well as the editor of a popular online journal, Defunct (Defunctmag.com) that features short essays on everything that’s had its day.  He currently directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa and is the founder and organizer of NonfictioNow, a biennial conference that will convene in November 2012 in Melbourne, Australia.

Lia Purpura Reading 4/5

A reading by
LIA PURPURA

Alexandroff Center Lecture Hall
600 S. Michigan Avenue, Room 921
Thursday, April 5, 6:00p.m.
The event is free and open to the public.
 
    
Photo credit Alan Kolc.

LIA PURPURA is the author of seven collections of essays, poems and translations, most recently, Rough Likeness (essays, Sarabande Books, January 2012). Her awards include Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for the essay collection On Looking), NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart prizes, work in Best American Essays, 2011, the AWP Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley award in Poetry.  Recent work appears in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.  She is Writer in Residence at Loyola University, Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.

THE 33 READING SERIES: March 15th

RYAN COURTWRIGHT is an MFA candidate at Columbia College.  He has been published by himself and in collaboration by The Sonora Review, The Normal School, Maggy Poetry, Anti-, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, Lo-Ball Magazine, Shampoo, and Pistola Magazine among others.

TOM NOWAK lives and writes in Chicago where he is an MFA candidate at Columbia College. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, apt, and Arsenic Lobster. He is currently level 5 in Skyrim and keeps getting caught stealing horses.

INGRID SAGOR received her BA in English in 2010 from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA—the most northwestern point of the continental US—and moved to the flatlands of Chicago in November 2010. For five years, Ingrid worked as a hairstylist and while she loved creating beautiful styles, she is happy to put her brain instead of her hands to work while studying at Columbia College in their MFA in Creative Nonfiction program. Her work has been published in Jeopardy Literary Magazine, Labyrinth, Free Verse and The Everett Herald. Ingrid is a Follett Fellow and a takes pride in her position as a Graduate Student Instructor.

EMILY SCHIKORA is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago where she is also a Graduate Student Instructor and Follet Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, Habit, and M Review. She grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska and now divides her time between Chicago and Portland, Oregon.

The Lifespan of a Genre: Micah McCrary Interviews John D'Agata

Newcity has published an interview with essayist and editor John D'Agata by MFA Candidate Micah McCrary. 

McCrary brings his sharp sense of the essay form to the conversation, and the two explore the boundaries and conventions of the generic labels nonfiction writers apply to their work. What does it mean to write journalistic essays? Essayistic journalism? Research-heavy memoir? What do we call nonfiction that forsakes fact? McCrary and D'Agata press these issues, and try to give name to a form that is by definition always shifting, always trying to figure itself out.

D'Agata is the author of About a Mountain and Halls of Fame, and the editor of the nonfiction anthologies The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay. He will be giving a reading at Columbia College next week along with Jim Fingal, the fact checker whose correspondence with D'Agata became the meat of the pair's new book: The Lifespan of a Fact, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

The reading, which is open to the public, will take place February 23 at 7 p.m. in Hokin Hall at 623 S. Wabash in Chicago.

Be sure to bone up beforehand and read McCrary's interview here. 

Bookslut Interviews David Lazar

David Lazar was interviewed by Andy Fitch at Bookslut for its February 2012 issue. The Q&A interview is a part of the publication’s new “Constructive Nonfiction” series, which aims to highlight the work of publishers, translators, impresarios, and teachers within the nonfiction community.

Check out the interview here!

MFA Candidates Publish in Columbia Poetry Review

Candidates Jennifer Tatum-Cotamagaña and Wes Jamison will have poetry appearing in the upcoming issue of Columbia Poetry Review.  Tatum-Cotamagaña's "topieceward" and an excerpt from her longer work "The Pain We Do Inflict," as well as Jamison's "Not in Me as Much as On" have found themselves a home in Columbia Poetry Review no. 25.