Patricia Clark

Phone: 616-331-3411

Department of Writing
326 Lake Ontario Hall
Allendale, MI 49401-9403

The Grand Valley Writers Series has a long history of bringing distinguished and emerging writers to campus to read from their work, visit classes, and interact with students across Grand Valley's campus. Along with the yearly Fall Arts Celebration and the Office of the President that co-sponsors Poetry Night, among other events, the following writers have come to read on campus: Charles Baxter, Amy Benson, Billy Collins, Peter Ho Davies, Junot Diaz, Rita Dove, Dan Gerber, Jim Harrison, Jonathan Johnson, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Debra Marquart, Michael Martone, David Means, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, and Joe Wenderoth, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, and many more.

Any questions about the series should be referred to GV Writers Series Coordinator and Assistant Professor Caitlin Horrocks (horrockc@gvsu.edu, 616-331-8022)

This year's guests:

Grand Valley Writers Series ’12-‘13

The Grand Valley Writers Series for Winter '13 now includes an additional visitor (poet Traci Brimhall, on March 11), and a date change: the First Books Festival will now be Thursday April 11, instead of April 1-2. The full, updated schedule is below. Please consider adding the events to your Winter course schedules, encouraging students to come, and/or bringing your classes that meet during these events.

Poet Traci Brimhall

March 11, 7:30pm reading at University Club, Pew Campus

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere.  She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

GVSU Faculty Reading: Patricia Clark and Chris Haven

Tuesday February 12, 2013

Reading 4pm Cook-Dewitt Auditorium

Patricia Clark is Poet-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. She is the author of four books of poetry: Sunday Rising, She Walks Into the Sea; My Father on a Bicycle; and North of Wondering. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, Mississippi Review, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Pennsylvania Review, North American Review, Seattle Review, and Iowa Woman. She has also co-edited an anthology of contemporary women writers called Worlds in Our Words, and served as the Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2005-2007.

Chris Haven’s poetry and fiction appears or is forthcoming in a number of journals including Threepenny Review, Hunger Mountain, Blackbird, The Normal School, Cold Mountain Review, Copper Nickel, Slice, Quiddity, and The New York Quarterly. He is an associate professor at Grand Valley State University, where he is the editor of Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture.

David Shields

Tuesday March 19, 2013

Reading and Q+A 6pm KC 2263

David Shields is the author of thirteen books, including How Literature Saved My Life (Knopf, 2013); Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), named one of the best books of the year by more than thirty publications; The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a New York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire,Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships, among other awards. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington.

Festival of First Books: Poet Glenn Shaheen, novelist V.V. Ganeshananthan, and short story writer Amina Gautier

Thursday April 11: Panel discussion about publishing 2:30-3:30 215/2216 Kirkhof
Reading at 7:30pm 2215/2216 Kirkhof

Individual Q+As: there are primarily class visits, but open to the public:

Glenn Shaheen visits WRT 320 Thursday 4/11, 4-5:15pm, 136 LSH

Amina Gautier visits WRT 430 Thursday 4/11, 4-5:15, ASH 1136

V. V. Ganeshananthan visits WRT 430 Thursday 4/11, 4-5:15, HON 220

V.V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Sepia Mutiny, Himal Southasian, and The American Prospect, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she currently serves on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. She teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is the Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. Random House published her first novel, Love Marriage, in April 2008. The book was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick.

Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for her short story collection At-Risk. More than seventy of her short stories have been published and her fiction appears in the anthologies Best African American Fiction and New Stories from the South and in numerous literary journals including Antioch Review, North American Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and StoryQuarterly.

Gautier is the recipient of the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, and the Danahy Fiction Prize, among others. She has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Sewanee Writer's Conference, Callaloo Writer's Workshop, Hurston/Wright Writer's Workshop, and the Ucross Residency. Gautier was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and currently lives in Chicago, IL, where she is an assistant professor of English at DePaul University, teaching courses in creative writing and African American literature.

Glenn Shaheen received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and currently lives in Michigan, where he edits the journal NANO Fiction and is the poetry editor for Third Coast. His book of poems, Predatory, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, Subtropics, and elsewhere. He presently serves on the board of directors for the Radius of Arab-American Writers, Inc.

Distinguished Alumni-in-Residence reading: T Fleischmann

Thursday October 18, 2012

1-2:15pm craft talk in KC 2263

4-5pm reading in KC 2263

T Fleischmann, a 2005 GVSU graduate and Writing major, lived by the Great Lakes until attending the University of Iowa and completing an MFA in Nonfiction Writing. Their essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Pleiades, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, and The Pinch, as well as in the feminist magazine make/shift, and have been Notable Essays in The Best American Essays, 2009 and 2010. A Nonfiction Editor at DIAGRAM, T has settled in rural Tennessee after traveling for several years across the United States. T’s book, Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay, was released in April 2012 from Sarabande Books.

My Heart is an Idiot: Found Magazine's 10th Anniversary Tour with Davy and Peter Rothbart

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Craft talk 4:30-5:30pm, Pere Marquette Room, KC

Performance 7:30pm, Cook-DeWitt Auditorium

Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, a frequent contributor to This American Life, and author of the story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. He writes regularly for GQ and Grantland, and his work also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Believer. His forthcoming book of personal essays is called My Heart is an Idiot, out in September, 2012, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Los Angeles, California.

Peter Rothbart is an award-winning songwriter, and the frontman for folk/rock group The Poem Adept. His third solo album, You Are What You Dream, will be released in fall 2012, and his music was featured in McSweeney's Wholphin DVD and the 2012 documentary film Mister Rogers & Me. He is also an editor at FOUND Magazine, and the executive director of the urban gardening organization We Patch.  He lives in Seattle, Washington.