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La Sociedad Para Las Artes

For more information about readings, please contact us at:

All readings are held Fridays at Hardman Hall, Room 106 at 7:30 PM and are free and open to all
(unless otherwise noted).

All readings sponsored by the NMSU English Department, Las Cruces Organization for the Arts (LOLA), the Southwest Border Cultures Institute and the Louletia B. Valentine Endowment.

Spring 2009 Readings

Robert Wilder (essayist)- February 6, with MFA candidate Justin Chrestman
Robert Wilder is the author of two critically acclaimed books of essays: Tales From The Teachers' Lounge and Daddy Needs a Drink, both of which have been optioned for television and film. He has published essays in Newsweek, Details, Salon, Parenting, Creative Nonfiction, Working Mother and elsewhere. He has been a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition and On Point and other national and regional radio programs including the Daddy Needs a Drink Minute which airs weekly on KBAC FM. Wilder's column, also titled "Daddy Needs A Drink," is printed monthly in the Santa Fe Reporter. Wilder lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico , with his wife, Lala, and their two children, Poppy and London.

Hoa Nguyen (poet)- February 20, with MFA candidate Blase Drexler
Hoa Nguyen will also present a craft talk on Saturday, February 21 in the Emerson Room (Room 229) in the English Department, entitled: Becoming a Poet: A Talk for Poets and Poetry Workshop Teachers.

This discussion will seek to answer some deceptively simple questions regarding how one becomes a poet in the world. The talk will address strategies for engaging with poetry communities, for seeing publications into print, starting a publishing venture and distributing work, lists of "essential" poet's books and more.

Born near Saigon in 1967, Hoa Nguyen grew up in the DC area and studied poetry at New College in San Francisco, California. She currently lives in Austin, Texas with the poet Dale Smith; together they publish Skanky Possum, a book imprint and journal, and curate a monthly reading series. She is the author of several chapbooks including Dark (Mike & Dale’s,1998), Parrot Drum (Leroy, 2000), Red Juice (Effing, 2005), Kiss A Bomb Tattoo (Effing, 2009). Her full-length books are Your Ancient See Through (Sub Press, 2002) and Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey, 2009).

Mary Ruefle (poet and fiction writer)- March 6, with MFA candidate Natalie Day
Mary Ruefle is the author of ten poetry collections; her most recent work is a book of prose, The Most of It (Wave Books, 2008). She also makes one-of-a-kind erasure books, using discarded nineteenth century texts, many of which have been exhibited in galleries and museums and sold into private collections. She is the recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, a Whiting Award, and an Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in southern Vermont.

Richard Russo (fiction writer)- April 3, with MFA candidate Michaela Spampinato
Richard Russo is the author of six novels including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, Empire Falls. In 1994, Russo’s book, Nobody’s Fool, was made into a
movie starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis. Newman also starred in the 1998 movie Twilight, for which Russo wrote the screenplay. Russo now divides his time between writing fiction and writing for the movies.

Richard Russo will also be available for a Q & A session on Friday 4/3 in the afternoon at 2:00 p.m. in the Emerson Room (Room 229) in the English Department.

 

Lila Zemborain (poet)- April 17, with MFA candidate Stephen Lloyd Webber

Eileen Miles (poet, essayist, fiction writer)-May 1, with with MFA candidate Nick Voges

PAST READINGS:
Spring 2008 Readings (PDF of schedule)

Tony Hoagland - Feb. 8 with Nathan GrahamTony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His chapbook, Hard Rain was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His other collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College.

Hoagland's other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry. In 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Letters praised the poet's work with a citation stating, "Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild."

His poems and critical writings have appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Agni, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and the 1991 Pushcart Prize anthology. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.

 

Peter Turchi – Feb. 22 with Dana KroosPeter Turchi is the author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; and The Pirate Prince, co-written with Cape Cod treasure hunter Barry Clifford, about Clifford’s discovery of the pirate ship Whydah. He has also co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life.

Peter Turchi’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Colorado Review, among other journals. “Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning,” was listed as one of 100 Notable Stories of 2002 by the editors of Best American Short Stories and one of 15 Recommended Stories by the jury for the O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received Washington College’s Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Born in Baltimore, he earned his BA at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and his MFA at the University of Arizona. He has taught at Northwestern University and Appalachian State University, has twice been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and in 2006 served as a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. Since 1993 he has taught fiction in and directed The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.

 

Don Kurtz – March 7 with Nicky PessaroffDon Kurtz is the author of South of the Big Four and Churchgoers. He was was born in Urbana and raised in the farm country of Illinois and Indiana. He won a 1992 Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published short fiction in the Iowa Review and Puerto del Sol. He now lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico

 

Jenny Boully – April 4 with Melanie ViramontesJenny Boully's The Body was published in 2002 by Slope Editions. In May, Tarpaulin Sky Press will publish her second book, [one love affair]*. The Book of Beginnings and Endings is forthcoming from Sarabande in 2007. Her chapbook of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon is forthcoming from the Coconut Chapbook Series. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2002, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and The Next American Essay. She is currently a Ph.D. student in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

About "22": "I wrote '22' a couple of years after realizing that being 22 was probably one of the worst, most bizarre experiences that I had lived through. I was trying to make art out of people, places, and events that I otherwise wanted to tuck away and never see again. At the same time, that year still seems so fresh, vivid and sensual to me. I think I might write another piece soon about being 22."

 

Kathleene West – April 18 with Sara ThomasKathleene West is a professor and Poetry Editor of Puerto del Sol. She received her B.A. from the University of Nebraska, her M.A. from the University of Washington, and Ph.D. in English Literature and Icelandic Studies from the University of Nebraska. She received a two-year Fulbright fellowship to research and write in Iceland. She was active in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in both Washington and Nebraska, and received the first Artist-in-the-City grant in Seattle. She worked with Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, WA and Abattoir Editions at the University of Nebraska/Omaha as a printer and book designer.

 

Connie Voisine – May 2 with Lecroy RhyamesIn 1987 I graduated from Yale University with a major in American Studies, with a concentration in film. While there, I was part of a theater company that took its plays to housing projects and prisons. As a member of that company, I taught playwriting and acting at Greenhaven Maximum Security Prison (for men) for a summer, discovering that I was energized by the way that art and activism could coincide, and that I loved to teach. During school, I took what creative writing classes I could (few were offered) and was part of the oldest creative writing workshop in America through a class called Daily Themes. Because I grew up in a Maine border town with few creative outlets, I moved to New York City once I graduated. I began studying writing with poets Nicholas Christopher and Philip Schultz at The New School, the Poetry Society of America and Writers Studio. New York launched me on a wonderful apprenticeship as a poet and I worked flexible jobs--from bartender to development researcher at The Brooklyn Museum--to facilitate poetry study and summer travel to Europe and Central America. Besides attending as many poetry readings as I could, I developed into an avid dance and music performance attendee, became interested in the visual arts, often going to five or six events a week. Overall, my immersion in the avant-garde art world of the 1980s allowed me to understand the benefits of a vibrant art community and the role of an artist within one. I got an MFA at University of California at Irvine and a Ph.D. in English at University of Utah. Before teaching here at NMSU, I taught for two years at University of Hartford in Connecticut. Currently I live in an old adobe house with my husband, the writer Rus Bradburd and our daughter Alma.

 

Spring 2007 (PDF of schedule)

Friday, Jan 26 C.J. Hribal and Joseph Scapellato
Hardman Hall, Room 106, 7:30pm
A native of Chicago and rural Wisconsin, C.J. Hribal has published four books of fiction: Matty's Heart, a collection of short fiction selected for a New Voices Award (New Rivers Press, 1984); American Beauty, a novel  (Simon and Schuster, 1987); The Clouds in Memphis, a collection of short stories and winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); and a novel, The Company Car  (Random House), 2005. He also edited and wrote the introduction for The Boundaries of Twilight: CzechoSlovak Writing from the New World. He teaches creative writing at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he resides, and at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina. 

Joseph Scapellato is an MFA candidate in fiction.

Friday, Feb 23 Thomas Sayers Ellis and Evan Lavender-Smith
Hardman Hall, Room 106, 7:30pm
Thomas Sayers Ellis's first full collection, The Maverick Room, was published by Graywolf Press in 2005. He is also the author of The Good Junk  (Take Three #1, Graywolf 1996); a chapbook entitled The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001) and the chaplet, Song On (WinteRed Press, 2005). He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and a faculty member of the Lesley University low-residency M.F.A program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry Series. Ellis was born and raised in Washington, D.C.

Evan Lavender-Smith is a 2002 graduate of NMSU's MFA program in creative writing and editor of Noemi Press.

Friday, Mar 9 Mary Jo Bang and Allyn West
Hardman Hall, Room 106, 7:30 pm
Mary Jo Bang is the author of Apology for Want, a debut collection of poems that won the 1996 Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize; The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans  2001; and Louise in Love  2001, a winner of the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress. Individual poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, The Paris Review, Fence, Best American Poetry  2001, 2004, and elsewhere. The recipient of numerous awards, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, Bang is a poetry editor for Boston Review and a member of the permanent faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. Her fourth book, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, was published in 2004 by Grove Press.

Allyn West is an MFA candidate in poetry.

Friday, Mar 30 David Foster Wallace and C. Parker Staley
Hardman Hall,  Room 106, 7:30pm
David Foster Wallace is the award winning author of several novels, more than a few short stories, and numerous articles, as well as being a college professor. He is most widely known for his epic novel, Infinite Jest, published in 1996. Topics covered in Wallace's work are wide ranging, but often concern the absurdities of contemporary American culture, particularly its addictions and excesses. Wallace has received the MacArthur Award, the Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review Prize for humor, the QPB Joe Savago New Voices Award, and an O. Henry Award. Other of his titles include Consider the Lobster and Other Essays  (2005), A Supposedly Funny Thing I will Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1998), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2000), The Broom of the System (1987), Girl with Curious Hair (1989) and Oblivion: Stories (2004).

C. Parker Staley is an MFA candidate in fiction.

Friday, Apr 13 Patty Seyburn and Lillie Robertson
Hardman Hall, Room 106, 7:30pm
Patty Seyburn has had two books of poems published: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She teaches at University of Southern California, and is coeditor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry.

Lillie Robertson is an MFA candidate in fiction.

Friday, Apr 27 Sheila Black and Nena Villamil
Hardman Hall, Room 106, 7:30pm
Sheila Black received her MFA in 1998 from the University of Montana. Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Copper Nickel, LitPot Review, DMQ Review,Willow Springs, Poet Lore, Ellipsis, Blackbird, The Pedestal, and Puerto Del Sol. In 2000, she was the U.S. cowinner of the FrostPellicer Frontera Prize, given  to one U.S. and one Mexican poet living along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Her first book House of Bone is out this spring by Custom Words Press. Her chapbook How to be a Maquiladora appeared from Main Street Rag Publishers in January 2007. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with her husband and children, where she works as Development Director for the Colonias Development Council (CDC), an organization that does community organizing in border colonia communities.

Nena Villamil is an MFA candidate in poetry.

Fall 2006 Readings (PDF of schedule)

All readings presented by La Sociedad Para Las Artes and Las Cruces Organization for the Literary Arts (LOLA)

Sept 8, Robert Wilder and Bonnie Schwartz
Robert Wilder is the author of Daddy Needs A Drink, a book of comedic essays that People magazine says, “Go down like a gin and tonic on a hot summer afternoon.” Daddy Needs A Drink has been called “Hilarious,”  “Sharply written,” and an “idiosyncratic charmer” by Publishers Weekly. Watson Pond Productions has optioned Daddy Needs a Drink and is currently developing a sitcom based on the book. Wilder has published fiction and nonfiction in Newsweek, Salon, Parenting, Creative Nonfiction, The Colorado Review and elsewhere. He has been a commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition and On Point and other national and regional radio programs. His column “Daddy Needs A Drink” is published monthly in the Santa Fe Reporter. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Lala, and their two children, Poppy and London.
(Flyer for reading)

Sept 22, Henry Shukman and Norissa Lears
A native of England, Henry Shukman has worked as trombonist, trawlerman and travel writer. His fiction has won an Arts Council Award and has been a finalist for the O. Henry Award.  Sons of the Moon, a travel book, was published when Shukman was nineteen; his first poetry collection, In Dr. No’s Garden, won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was Book of the Year in the Times (London) and The Guardian. His latest book, a collection of stories called Mortimer of the Maghreb, was published by Alfred A. Knopf earlier this year. Author Peter Matthiessen calls Shukman “a very talented new voice in fiction.” Shukman earned an M.A. in Creative Writing at NMSU and currently resides in Santa Fe. Norissa Lears is an MFA candidate in poetry.
(Flyer for reading)

Oct 6, Maria Melendez and Carolina Monsivais
(Presented in conjunction with the Southwest and Border Cultures Institute at NMSU)
Until recently, María Meléndez taught creative writing and multi-ethnic literatures at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana.  Her collection of poetry, How Long She’ll Last in This World, was published in January 2006 by the University of Arizona Press, and her chapbook, Base Pairs, appeared in 2001 with Swan Scythe Press.  From 2000-2003, she worked as Writer-in-Residence at the UC Davis Arboretum, where she taught multicultural environmental poetry workshops for the public.  She currently serves as Associate Editor for poetry at Momotombo Press. Her own poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in such magazines as International Quarterly, Orion Afield and Ecological Restoration. She recently relocated to Logan, Utah, with her husband and two children. Caroline Monsivais is an MFA candidate in poetry.

Nov 3, ZZ Packer and Rus Bradburd
Casa de Peregrinos Food Bank Benefit Reading and Reception
Location: Rio Grande Theatre Downtown; Starts 7:00 pm
ZZ Packer has been a public high school teacher and barmaid (though not at the same time), has worked as an SAT tutor, a purveyor of vegetables and as a coffeeshop barrista, where she indeed wished on multiple occasions to be drinking coffee elsewhere. She was born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, KY. She received her M.A. at Johns Hopkins and M.F.A. at Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she also held a Jones Lectureship. Her debut story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, published in 2003, has been widely acclaimed. Individual stories from the collection have found their way into more than a dozen anthologies. She currently lives in the Bay Area with her husband and son and is excited to visit southern New Mexico.

Rus Bradburd is a graduate of New Mexico State University’s creative writing program, where he earned an MFA in 2002 after 14 years of coaching Division I Basketball at University of Texas, El Paso, and NMSU. Paddy on the Hardwood (UNM Press, 2006) is a memoir based on his experiences coaching professional basketball and learning Irish fiddling in County Kerry, Ireland. His short stories have been published in Aetholon, Puerto Del Sol, and The Southern Review. He teaches English and creative writing at NMSU and lives in Las Cruces with his wife Connie and daughter Alma.

Dec 1 , Peter Filkins and Lindsay Armstrong
Peter Filkins has published two volumes of poetry, What She Knew (1998) and After Homer (2002) and has translated Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association as well as the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, MA. He will be reading from his translations of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann.

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. In 1953 she received the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit), after which there followed her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großen Bären) in 1956. The premier post-war Austrian feminist poet went on to write short stories, essays, opera libretti, and novels, including The Thirtieth Year, Malina, and The Book of Franza. At the time of her death in a fire in Rome in 1973, Bachmann was at work on a cycle of novels titled Todesarten (Ways of Dying). Lindsay Armstrong is an MFA candidate in fiction.

 

La Sociedad Para Las Artes
Spring 2006 Readings (PDF of schedule)

January 27, Keith Lee Morris and Heather Herrmann
Keith Lee Morris is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. His book of short stories, The Best Seats in the House (University of Nevada Press, 2004), relates the experiences of men in Northern Idaho, where Morris lives part of the year. The Greyhound God, a novel, was published by University of Nevada Press in 2003. His short stories have been included in many literary journals, including Puerto del Sol, Georgia Review and the New England Review.

February 17, Charles Baxter and Stefan McKinstray
Charles Baxter is the author of Saul and Patsy, published in 2003 by Pantheon. His previous novel, The Feast of Love, (Pantheon/Vintage), was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000. He has published two other novels, First Light and Shadow Play, and four books of stories, most recently, Believers. He has also published essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House and the forthcoming, Beyond Plot, and has edited or co-edited three books of essays, The Business of Memory, Bringing the Devil to His Knees, and A William Maxwell Portrait. His book of poems, Imaginary Paintings, was published by Paris Review Editions. He also edited Best New American Voices 2001 and was the judge for the Bakeless Prize in Fiction in 2004. He lived for many years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he taught at the University of Michigan. He now lives in Minneapolis and is currently the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.

March 3, Clare Rossini and Meggin Wood
Clare Rossini is director of the Trinity Center for Collaborative Teaching and Research (TCCTR) at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.  Rossini was Assistant Professor in English and Poet in Residence at Carleton College. Rossini’s poetry has appeared in a wide range of prestigious journals. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Columbia University Bennet Cerf award for poetry, a Bread Loaf Scholar Award, a MacDowell Foundation fellowship and the 2003 Connecticut Circuit Poet Award. Her third volume of poetry, Lingo, will be published this spring by the University of Akron Press.

March 31, Zhang Er with Leonard Schwartz, translator
Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China, and moved to New York City in 1986.  A collection of her poetry, Seen, Unseen, was published by QingHai Publishing House of China in 1999; Water Words was published by New World Poetry Press in 2002.  Many of her poems have appeared in English translation in poetry journals throughout the world. Her chapbooks in translation include Winter Garden (Goats and Compasses), Verses on Bird (Jensen/Daniels), The Autumn of Gu Yao (Spuyten Duyvil), Cross River, Pick Lotus (Belladonna Books), and Carved Water (Tinfish Press).  Verses on Bird, Er's selected poems in a bilingual English-Chinese edition, was published by Zephyr Press in the summer of 2004.  She currently teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

Leonard Schwartz is a professor of literary arts at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He was born in 1963 in New York City and is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House), Words Before The Articulate: New and Selected Poems, (Talisman House), Gnostic Blessing (Goats and Compasses), Meditation (Cloud House), Objects of Thought, Attempts At Speech (Gnosis Press), Exiles: Ends (Red Dust Press), and, most recently, Ear And Ethos (Talisman House). He is also the author of a collection of essays, A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays on Poetics 1987-1997 (Spuyten Duyvil). He received a 1997 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

April 7, Antonya Nelson and Brent Delanoy
Antonya Nelson is the author of eight books of fiction, the most recent of which is Some Fun, a collection of stories and a novella (March 2006, Scribner). She has taught at NMSU for seventeen years and lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Telluride, Colorado. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Rea Award for the Short Story. Her work has been widely published in such magazines as The New Yorker, Esquire and Harper’s as well as a number of anthologies, including the O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories.

April 28, Richard Siken and Lauren Genovesi
Richard Siken's first poetry collection, Crush (2005), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize selected by Louise Glück. Siken was born in New York City and raised in Arizona, where he received an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona.  He is co-founder and editor of the literary magazine spork. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Indiana Review and Forklift, Ohio. Siken is also a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, an Arizona Commission on the Arts grant and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poem, “The Dislocated Room,” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove.