CREATIVE WRITING Fall Series, 2009

PETER FILKINS

PUBLIC TALK, "Ingeborg Bachmann: Everyday War": Thursday, September 10, 7 p.m., University Center Lounge, reception to follow at the Davidson Honors College, University of Montana, Missoula. 

PUBLIC POETRY READING OF OWN WORK & BOOK SIGNING: Friday, September 11, 7 p.m., Shakespeare & Co., 103 S. 3rd. W., Missoula.

 Sponsored by Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs, Department of Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures, Davidson Honors College and Creative Writing Program.

ANNIE FINCH                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             PUBLIC READING: Thursday, September 24, 7 p.m., Poetry Corner (Mansfield Library, 5th floor, NW corner), University of Montana, Missoula.

Sponsored by College of Arts & Sciences and Creative Writing Program.

MICHAEL PERRY
PUBLIC READING & BOOK SIGNING: Friday, October 2, 7 p.m. in The Dell Brown Room, Turner Hall, University of Montana, Missoula.

Sponsored by the President’s Writers-in-Residence Series.

ROBERT BOSWELL                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   PUBLIC CRAFT TALK: Friday, November 13, 1 - 2 p.m. in the North Underground Lecture Hall, University of Montana, Missoula.

PUBLIC READING & BOOK SIGNING: Friday, November 13, 7 p.m., The Dell Brown Room, University of Montana, Missoula.

Sponsored by the President’s Writers-in-Residence Series.

PETER ORNER                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          PUBLIC READING & BOOK SIGNING: Friday, December 4, 7 p.m. in The Dell Brown Room, Turner Hall, University of Montana, Missoula.

Sponsored by the Kittredge Writer-in Residence Program.


ROBERT BOSWELL is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a 2009 story collection with Graywolf Press. His novels include Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections are Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. Boswell has two nonfiction books: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson. He can be found online at www.robertboswell.com

PETER FILKINS is a poet and an acclaimed translator who received a Berlin Prize fellowship in 2005. Filkins is the author of two books of poems, After Homer (2002) and What She Knew (1998). His translation of H.G. Adler's Holocaust novel, The Journey, was published in 2008, and his translation of Ingeborg Bachmann's collected poems, Darkness Spoken, was published in 2006. (Click here to read Zephyr Press' review ofDarkness Spoken.) Filkins is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award (1994) from the American Literary Translators Association and a Distinguished Translation Award (2007) from the Austrian government. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including The American Scholar, Paris Review, Poetry, Partisan Review, and the N.Y. Times Book Review. Filkins earned an MFA in poetry at Columbia University and was a Fulbright Fellow in German at the University of Vienna from 1983 to 1985. He has held residencies at the Yaddo Artists Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Filkins currently teaches and is the head of the Poetry & Fiction Series at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, MA.

ANNIE FINCH's books of poetry include Calendars (a 2003 National Poetry Series finalist), Eve, Home-Birth, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, Season Poems, Catching the Mermother, the epic poem Marie Moving, and a book of translations of the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé. Her book on poetics, The Ghost of Meter, has been reissued in paperback, and her anthology A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women is in its fifth printing. She is coeditor of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and her poems and translations have been published in the Norton Anthology of World Poetry and the Penguin Book of the Sonnet. She studied poetry and poetry-writing at Yale, verse-drama at the University of Houston 's graduate creative writing program, and earned a Ph.D in English and American Literature from Stanford University. Finch currently directs the Stonecoast Masters of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine. She can be found online at www.anniefinch.com

PETER ORNER is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006--a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001--awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction). A film version of one of Orner's stories, The Raft, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.  A book of oral histories, edited by Orner, Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, was published in 2008 by McSweeneys for the Voice of Witness Series. For more information, go to voiceofwitness.org. Orner's stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual. Orner has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. Currently, Orner is an associate professor at San Francisco State University. He can be found online at www.peterorner.net

MICHAEL PERRY is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoirs Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and Truck: A Love Story, the essay collection Off Main Street, and the upcoming memoir Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon.co and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. His essays have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered; he has performed and produced two live audience recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow). Perry lives in rural Wisconsin , where he remains active with the local volunteer rescue service. He can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com


Programming for the Creative Writing Program Fall Reading Series is made possible by the President’s Writers-In-Residence Series and the Creative Writing Program. For more information call (406) 243-5267.