News & Events

Kevin Canty will read this summer from his new collection of short stories, Where the Money Went. He will be in New York City, July 8, at Joe's Pub as part of the Happy Ending Reading Series with Binnie Kirschenbaum, Nick Laird and musical guest Elvis Perkins. Tickets are required, and they do sell out quickly. Kevin will also read at Shakespeare & Co. in Missoula on July 14, Elliot Bay in Seattle on August 4 and Powell's on Hawthorne in Portland on August 6.

The following authors will be visiting the University of Montana Fall Semester 2009:

Annie Finch

(photo credit:www.anniefinch.com)

ANNIE FINCH: Public Reading and Talk about her research on the Glacier Park Wolves, Thursday, September 24, 7 pm, Poetry Corner (Mansfield Library, 5th floor, NW corner).

Michael Perry

(photo credit: c.J. Shimon and J. Lindemann)

MICHAEL PERRY: Public Reading, Friday, October 2, 7 pm, Dell Brown Room at Turner Hall, The University of Montana, Missoula.

Robert Boswell

(photo credit: www.robertboswell.com)

ROBERT BOSWELL: Public Reading, Friday, November 13, 7 pm, Dell Brown Room at Turner Hall, The University of Montana, Missoula.

Peter Orner

(photo credit: Kristin Hepburn)

PETER ORNER: Public Reading, Friday, December 4, 7 pm, Dell Brown Room at Turner Hall, University of Montana, Missoula.

Click here for a complete schedule of University of Montana Creative Writing Program events.

The University of Montana Creative Writing Program is a sponsor of the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, April 7 - 10. Featured presenters at the conference are Michael Chabon, Rick Bass, Rita Dove, Etgar Keret, George Saunders, Terry Tempest Williams and Achy Obejas.

Summer 2009

The 406 Writers’ Workshop is a salon-style writing workshop with year-round writing classes held in the welcoming, comfortable confines of instructors’ homes. (Many of the instructors are alums of the University of Montana MFA Program.) Summer 2009 workshops:

Novel class with Michael Fitzgerald begins 6/29
Poetry with Chris Dombrowski begins 7/14
Short Fiction with Elizabeth Urschel begins 7/15
Nonfiction with Bryan Di Salvatore begins 8/17

Small, weekly classes are held from 7:00-9:15 p.m. The price for a six-week workshop is $150. Visit www.406writersworkshop.com for more information.

Robert Stubblefield will be on the faculty for Summer Fishtrap 2009 Summer Fishtrap 2009, July 5-12, Wallowa Lake, Oregon. He will teach a short fiction workshop.

John Myers (Second Year MFA) will have his poem "Sigilism" published in the Fall 2009 issue of A cappella Zoo. Myers also had a piece called "Accretion" accepted for publication online at elimae.com.

Aaron Shulman (MFA '09) was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Guatemala for the coming year to work on his novel and teach American literature at the Universidad del Valle. Also, Shulman recently wrote a cover story for AARP's bilingual magazine, Segunda Juventud.

Sharma Shields (MFA '04) has stories published in The Hawaii Review, The Sonora Review and Fugue, with another story forthcoming in The Iowa Review.
Shields also just won a grant from Artist Trust of Washington State to submit her short story collection, Field Guide to Monsters of the Inland Northwest, to various agents and publishers.

FEATURED BOOKS

Where the Money Went by Kevin Canty

Kevin Canty's new collection of stories entitled Where the Money Went is forthcoming in July 2009 from Nan A. Talese / Knopf.

60 Indian Poets - Anthology includes work by Prageeta Sharma

60 Indian Poets (Penguin Books India, 2008) spans fifty-five years of poetry in English, bridging continents and generations, and seeks to expand the definition of "Indianness"...This definative anthology aims for vericality rather than chronology. Exhaustive and stunning in its scale and vitality, it represents a community 'separated by the sea' and connected too - in familial ways - by the unlikely histories of a shared English language. Visit the PBI website here.

Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean

Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean (Knopf, 2002) was recently mentioned by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books evoking the Modern American West. The list also includes books by Gretel Ehrlich, James Galvin, Geoffrey O'Gara and Terry Tempest Williams. To read the full article, visit the WSJ here.

Language for a New CEntury

Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, a landmark anthology, providing the most ambitious, far-reaching collection of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern poetry available, is now available from W.W. Norton. The anthology, co-edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, includes the work of 400 writers, including Creative Writing director Prageeta Sharma. For more information, visit the Norton website here.

Karen Volkman's Nomina

Karen Volkman's Nomina has been released from BOA Editions as part of their American Poets Continuum Series. Nomina, Volkman's third full-length collection of poems, Nomina is a book of sonnets, yet sonnets that "far from a tidy closed form ... are volatile, sometimes violent instruments, resounding with struggle and shock." For more information, and to read an excerpt, visit the BOA site here--to read the review of Nomina in Time Out New York, visit here.

THE PROGRAM

The University of Montana's writing program began formally in 1966 with the establishment of the M.F.A. degree, and has been shaped and influenced over the years by the likes of Hugo, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Leslie Fiedler. Today it is nourished by a talented, committed, and accomplished group of faculty-writers, as well as by an increasingly distinguished community of alumni. Together with the talents and accomplishments of our current students, this community is continuing the M.F.A.'s program as one of the oldest and most prestigious programs in the country. Prageeta Sharma is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.