Riggio Forum: Women in Letters and Literary Arts @ the New School

Monday, March 1st @ 6:30 p.m.
Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall
66 West 12th Street — Room 510
New York, NY
WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) will celebrate the formation of their new organization with a reading and panel presentation at the New School in New York, NY.
Merging the creative and the critical, this event will feature brief readings by women integrally involved in the development of the organization, including poets Cate Marvin (Co-director of WILLA), Ann Townsend, Amy King, and Natalie Bryant Rizzieri; creative nonfiction writer Barrie Jean Borich; children’s literature authors Laurel Snyder and Kekla Magoon; and fiction writer Susan Steinberg.
A panel discussion will follow on the state of women’s literature today. Poet and New School Writing Program faculty member Mark Bibbins moderates.
Sponsored by the New School Writing Program.
FEATURED READERS INCLUDE—
Barrie Jean Borich is the author of My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf), winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. She’s the recipient of the 2010 Crab Orchard Review John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, and has essays appearing in current or forthcoming issues of Ecotone, Seneca Review, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review and Seattle Review. Her work has been named Notable in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading, has received Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and has been awarded a Bush Artist Fellowship and Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction. Her first book, Restoring the Color of Roses, a memoir set in the Calumet region of Chicago, was published by Firebrand. She’s an assistant professor in the MFA/BFA programs of Hamline University where she’s the nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review.
Amy King’s most recent books are Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox) and, forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She edits the Poetics List (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO), and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. King also co-curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry.
Kekla Magoon is a New York City-based author, editor, speaker and educator. Her debut novel, The Rock and the River (Aladdin, 2009), won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, in addition to being named an ALA/YALSA Best Book for Young Adults. Kekla is Co-Editor of YA and Children’s Literature for Hunger Mountain, the arts journal of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also leads writing workshops for youth and adults, and writes non-fiction titles for the educational market. Kekla holds a B.A. in History from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Cate Marvin’s first book of poems, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, also published by Sarabande, appeared in 2007. A 2007 Whiting Award recipient and NYFA Gregory Millard Fellow, she co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ninth Letter, The New England Review, Tin House, and Kenyon Review. She is an associate professor in English at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program in creative writing at Lesley University. She lives in Staten Island, NY.
Natalie Bryant Rizzieri recently received her MFA in poetry from Lesley University. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and Connotations. She is also the founder of Friends of Warm Hearth, a group home for Armenian orphans with disabilities and travels to Armenia on a regular basis. She lives in Queens, New York.
Laurel Snyder is the author of two picture books, Inside the Slidy Diner and Baxter: the Pig who Wanted to Be Kosher, three novels, Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, Any Which Wall, and Penny Dreadful, and three collections of poetry, including The Myth of the Simple Machines and Daphne & Jim: a choose-your-own-adventure-biography-in verse. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered, she lives in Atlanta.
Susan Steinberg is the author of two short story collections, Hydroplane (FC2) and The End of Free Love (FC2). Her stories have also appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, LIT, Columbia, and other literary journals. She has held residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, The Wurlitzer Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, and she was recently Scholar-in-Residence in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She received a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of San Francisco.
Ann Townsend is the author of two collections of poetry: Dime Store Erotics (Silverfish Review Press, 1998), and The Coronary Garden (Sarabande Books, 2005). She is the editor of a collection of essays, Radiant Lyre: on Lyric Poetry (with David Baker), published by Graywolf Press in 2007. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Individual Artist’s grant from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Discovery Prize from The Nation. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The New Young American Poets, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Dominic Consolo Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Denison University, Ann Townsend also owns and operates Bittersweet Farm in Granville, Ohio.

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