Southeast Missouri State University's Department of English has announced a stellar line-up of authors visiting the campus this fall, including New Yorks Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Vijay Seshadri.
Each writer will deliver a reading that is free and open to the public. These events are made possible through the Dorothy and Wedel Nilsen Visiting Writers Series endowment.
Wednesday, Sept. 14, Visiting Writer Erik Campbell, 7 p.m., University Center Ballroom B
Erik Campbell is the author of Arguments for Stillness(Curbstone Press, 2006) and The Corpse Pose (Red Hen Press, 2016). He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Art Council and lives in Nebraska. His poetry collection, arguments for Stillness,was listed in the top 10 most important poetry collections of 2007 byBooksense along withZbigniew Herbert, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg and Ted Kooser, among others.
Wednesday, Sept. 28, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri, 7 p.m., Glenn Auditorium, Dempster Hall
Vijay Seshadri was born in India and came to the United States at the age of five. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University. He is a Brooklyn, New Yorkbased Pulitzer prize winning poet, essayist and literary critic, and author of Wild Kingdom(1996);The Long Meadow(2003), which won the James Laughlin Award;and 3 Sections (2013),which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Pulitzer committee described the book as a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.
Seshadrihas received fellowships from theNew York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Hehas worked as an editor at the New Yorker and has taught at Bennington College and Sarah Lawrence College, where he currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program.
Wednesday, Oct. 26, Visiting Novelist James Tate J.T. Hill, 7 p.m., University Center Ballroom B
James Tate Hill is the author of Academy Gothic, winner of the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel from Southeast Missouri State University Press. He serves as Fiction and Reviews Editor for the literary journal Monkeybicycle, an imprint of Dzanc Books. His fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Sonora Review, The South Carolina Review, The Laurel Review, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. He holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Hollins University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he served as Fiction Editor of The Greensboro Review.
Tuesday, Nov. 15, Visiting Writer Lincoln Michel, 7 p.m., Glenn Auditorium, Dempster Hall
Lincoln Michel is the editor-in-chief of electricliterature.com and a founding editor of Gigantic. His fiction has appeared in Granta, Oxford American, Tin House, NOON, Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Believer, book forum, Buzzfeed, Vice, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. Sometimes he draws famous authors as monsters. He is the co-editor of Gigantic Worlds, an anthology of science flash fiction, and the author of Upright Beasts, a collection of short stories Coffee House Press. He was born in Virginia and lives in Brooklyn. He tweets at @the lincoln.
For more information, contact Dr. Susan Swartwout at (573) 651-2044 or upressdirector@semo.edu.