The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation: Arkansas Festival of Writers

Link: The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation: Arkansas Festival of Writers.

The 2008 Arkansas Festival of Writers will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation with readings by Susan Perabo, Leon Stokesbury, and other alumni. The festival will be held April 9 & 10 on the UA campus in Fayetteville. Information on travel and lodging is available at the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce. A full schedule of events is below.

Wednesday, April 9
* 5:30 pm, Giffels Auditorium - Reading by Susan Perabo and Leon Stokesbury
* 7 pm, Garden Room on Dickson Street - Formal dinner and reception

Thursday, April 10
* 5 pm, Giffels Auditorium - Screening of "Fighting Mad," featuring Peter Fonda, James Whitehead, Bill Harrison, and Miller Williams
* 7 pm, Giffels Auditorium - 40th Anniversary Celebration and Reading
* 9 pm - Reception, hosted by Bill and Merlee Harrison

Guests

Susan Perabo is the writer in residence and associate professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She is the author of a collection of stories, "Who I Was Supposed to Be" (Simon&Schuster, 1999), which was named a Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch, and a novel, "The Broken Places" (Simon&Schuster, 2001). Recently her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, and Creative Non-Fiction. Two of her new stories were shortlisted in this year's "Best American Short Stories." She is currently finishing a second collection of short fiction.

Leon Stokesbury received his MA and MFA from the University of Arkansas in 1972, and his PhD from Florida State University in 1984. He has taught creative writing at several colleges and universities, including serving as visiting poet-in-residence at North Texas University, Hollins College, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. For the past 20 years he has taught in the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Stokesbury's first book, Often in Different Landscapes, was selected as a co-winner of the first annual Associated Writing Programs Poetry Competition in 1975. His collection Autumn Rhythm: New and Selected Poems, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1996, was awarded The Poets' Prize as the best book of poems published by an American for that year. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Partisan Review, the New Yorker, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the New England Review, and numerous other journals. Stokesbury was selected as the first recipient of The Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence, has been awarded the Robert Frost Fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, and is a recipient of an NEA fellowship in poetry.