Wednesday, May 14, 2003

CONTACT: J. Rich, (706) 542-2659, jrich@parallel.park.uga.edu

UGA’S CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM HOSTS SECOND WEEK OF LITERARY EVENTS

ATHENS, Ga. – The University of Georgia Creative Writing Program will host several literary events next week. All events will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Park Hall room 265.

T.R. Hummer, poet, editor of The Georgia Review and professor of English at UGA, will give a talk on literary magazine editing on Monday, May 19. Hummer is the author of Useless Virtues (LSU Press), Walt Whitman in Hell (LSU Press) and several other books of poetry. His work has appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Poets & Writers, The Hudson Review and The Paris Review. He is the recipient of the 1999 Hanes Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. This event is free and open to the public.

Novelist Mary Hood will read from her work on Tuesday, May 20. Hood is the author of two collections of short stories, How Far She Went and And Venus is Blue and the novel Familiar Heat. She is the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award, Townsend Prize, LSU/Southern Review Short Fiction Award, and her work has been included in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, New Stories from the South, Pushcart Prize Anthology and others. In 2001 she received the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Robert Penn Warren Award. She has been Visiting Creative Writer at UGA and held the Grisham Chair in Fiction at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. This event is free and open to the public.

Brian Henry, poet, assistant professor of English and director of UGA’s Creative Writing Program, will read from his work on Wednesday, May 21. Henry’s most recent book, American Incident, is a collection of prose and poetry that tests the possibilities of genre. His first book of poetry, Astronaut, has appeared in the United States (Carnegie Mellon University Press), England (Arc Publications) and Slovenia (Modena Publishing). He won the 2001 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and was shortlisted for the 2000 Forward Prize in England. He has published poetry in numerous magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review and New American Writing, as well as in several anthologies. He is editor of the internationally acclaimed Verse and founder of Verse Press. This event is free and open to the public.

David Berman will read from his work on Thursday, May 22. Berman is the author of a book of poetry, Actual Air, and is a singer/songwriter with the Silver Jews. His songs include Natural Bridge, American Water and Bright Flight. Admission is $5.

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