Award-winning poet Lee Ann Roripaugh will perform a public reading of her work on Monday, Feb. 10, at Southeast Missouri State University as part of the Dorothy and Wedel Nilsen Visiting Writers Series.
The event, sponsored by the Southeast Missouri State University Press, is scheduled from 7-8 p.m. in Dempster Auditorium of Crisp Hall (Room 105) and is free and open to the public.
A book signing will follow the reading, and books will be available for purchase at the event.
The Nilsen Visiting Writer Program brings several successful writers to campus each semester to talk with students about the crafts of writing and editing.
Roripaugh is the author of five volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, “tsunami vs. the fukushima 50,” was released by Milkweed Editions in March 2019. Her second volume, “Year of the Snake” (Southern Illinois University Press), was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and her first book, “Beyond Heart Mountain” (Penguin Books), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award; the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association; and the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize.
Her short stories have been shortlisted as stories of note in the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and five of her essays have been shortlisted as essays of note for the Best American Essays anthology. Her poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as director of Creative Writing and editor-in-chief of the South Dakota Review. She is also a faculty mentor for the Carlow University low-residency M.F.A. in Writing, and served as a 2012 Kundiman faculty mentor alongside Li-Young Lee and Srikanth Reddy.
For more information, contact Dr. Jenny Cropp, assistant professor of English at Southeast, at (573) 651-2624 or jcropp@semo.edu.