April 9--------Kevin Stewart

Please join us on April 9 at 8 pm in Memorial Hall on the UMass Amherts campus for a reading by novelist Kevin Stewart as part of the Visiting Writers Series.

A native of Princeton, WV, Kevin Stewart is the author of The Way Things Always Happen Here: Eight Stories and a Novella (Vandalia Press, 2007) and Margot (Texas Review Press, 2000). He has been nominated for Forward Magazine's Book of the Year Award for fiction/short stories, and the Weatherford Award for Appalachian fiction/poetry. Stewart has also been awarded the Appalachian Heritage's Plattner Award in fiction, the Texas Review novella prize, and state arts fellowships from Louisiana and West Virginia. Stories from his forthcoming collection Tales From The North Gates have appeared in the Southeast Review and are forthcoming in the Hamilton Review. Other work has appeared in Shenandoah, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review and more. He currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown.

Feb. 2: Tomaz Salamun

Please come and witness the elegance and majesty of one of Slovenia's and the world's greatest contemporary poets, Tomaz Salamun, on Monday, February 2, at 8 p.m. in Memorial Hall on the UMass Amherst campus.

He's kind of a big thing. With confident steps and a steady hand, Salamun maps the ever-fluctuating space occupied by avant garde poetry. His poetry informs of the possibilities contained within the union of mystery and emotion bound together by the fearful joy of absurdity. To read Salamun is to embark upon a journey through the mind of a poet who, for over 40 years, has made it his imperative to find intrigue in the ordinary, to find beauty in the ordinary, and to find beauty in the intrigue of everything from "a robbery of bees" to "trash bags smashed on the heads of maids." He has fittingly been bestowed with accolades and honors from prestigious institutes on both sides of the Atlantic. He was for a time the Slovenian Cultural Attaché to the U.S., and he has taught at various writing programs in the U.S., including the Iowa Writers Workshop and the UMass Program for Poets and Writers. So come!

As always, this event is free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible.

FRANZ!

Please come to a reading by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Franz Wright on Thursday, December 11, at 8 pm in the University Gallery in the Fine Arts Center on the UMass Amherts campus.

Franz Wright was born in Vienna in 1953. During his youth, his family moved to the Northwest United States, the Midwest, and northern California. Wright's most recent collections of poetry include Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) which received a Pulitzer Prize, The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). He has also translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Wright has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Once again, VWS events are free, open to the public, and handicap accessible.

Writers! Poets! Friends of writers or poets! You who do not write yourself nor know anyone who writes but is a lover of words!

Two readings at Memorial Hall on the UMass Amherst campus

Thursday, December 4 at 8 p.m.

IT'S FREE

ALL ARE INVITED

LENI ZUMAS is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City). Her work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Quarterly West, Harp & Altar, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. A 2008 fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she teaches creative writing at Hunter College.

PAMELA THOMPSON is a graduate of Yale College and the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she received the Slosberg memorial award for fiction and poetry. Following the publication of her novel Every Past Thing in the fall of 2007, she was a MacDowell Colony fellow. She lives with her family in Worthington, Massachusetts, and works as the editorial director of Interlink Books. With Hilary Plum, she is the founder of Clock/Root Books, which specializes in publishing literature in translation.

Gillian Conoley Reading November 13!

Join us in Memorial Hall on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus on Thursday, November 13 at 8 p.m. for this reading by Gillian Conoley. All VWS events are free, open to the public, and handicap accessible.

Gillian Conoley's collections include Profane Halo (Wave Books 2005); Lovers in the Used World (Carnegie Mellon, 2001); Beckon (Carnegie Mellon, 1996); Tall Stranger (Carnegie Mellon, 1991), finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award; and Some Gangster Pain (Carnegie Mellon, 1987). A recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, several Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Fund for Poetry Award, she is the professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt. Her work has been widely anthologized, most recently in W.W. Norton's American Hybrid, Scribner's Best American Poetry, Fence's Best of Fence, Counterpath's Lyric Postmodernisms, and the Italian anthology, Nuova Poesia Americana, published by Oscar Mondadori. Her latest book, Plot Genie, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in Fall 2009.